Crooked Media - What A Day: Oh my Nord

Leaked classified reports have unearthed some blockbuster information regarding last fall’s Nord Stream pipeline attack. 
 

• Late last September, sudden, unexplained gas leaks were reported in the pipelines between Russia and Germany known as Nord Stream 1 and 2, later found to have resulted from bomb attacks. At the time, it was widely assumed that Russia was behind the sabotage, as the only global actor that could actually benefit from more uncertainty in the European gas market. But a new report from the Washington Post details that the Biden administration knew months in advance that Ukraine planned to attack the undersea network. 
   

• Information about the plan had been collected by a European intelligence service, then shared with the CIA in June of last year, with some of the most specific evidence to date linking the Ukrainian government to the bomb attack in the Baltic Sea. This revelation is the latest to come out of the massive Discord leak by (rogue racist guy who isn’t old enough to rent a car but for some reason had unbelievably high security clearance) Jack Teixeira, a junior Air National Guardsman.

• The details resulting from the investigation include highly specific numbers and methods of attack, meaning that for the better part of a year, Western allies had evidence leading them to suspect that the actor behind the attack was Ukraine. Ukrainian officials did not respond to requests for comment and previously denied the country was involved in the attack. The White House and the CIA also declined to comment.

This is…not great!
 

• At the time of the attack, some members of the Biden administration suggested that Russia was to blame. President Biden promised that the United States would work with its allies to “get to the bottom of,” what he characterized as a “deliberate act of sabotage.” Publicly, the Biden administration officials have deflected about who they believe was responsible for the attack, but privately, they began admitting that there was no evidence that conclusively pointed to Moscow in late fall of 2022. 
   

• History may have repeated itself on Tuesday when Ukraine and Russia accused each other of attacking a major dam and hydroelectric power plant in southern Ukraine, which resulted in flooding near the front lines. A White House spokesman said the administration is closely monitoring the repercussions of the attack, but offered no assessment of who or what caused the dam to collapse. The International Atomic Energy Agency warned both countries not to undermine the safety of the nearby nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, but also noted that there was “no immediate risk” to it.

The United States’s unequivocal support for Ukraine stems from Ukraine’s innocence. Largely, of course, it is. But these latest revelations (and the fact that the U.S. seemingly knew all along) is a good reminder that we must maintain a critical eye with our allies, not just our adversaries.

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The Supreme Court’s erosion of the separation of church and state reached a logical and much-feared result on Monday when a state school board in Oklahoma voted to approve what would be the first publicly-funded, explicitly religious school in the nation. Attorney General Gentner Drummond (R-OK) warned the board that the division clearly violates the state constitution, but it voted to approve a K-12 online public charter school run by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma nonetheless. Shortly after the vote, Drummond made a statement calling the approval “contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers.” Executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma Brett Farley said, “We are elated that the board agreed with our argument and application for the nation’s first religious charter school.” Activist groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State were decidedly less excited. Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK)—who earlier this year signed a bill into law giving parents in the state a tax incentive to send their children to private schools including religious schools—praised the board’s vote, as it furthers his goals of imposing Christianity on all Oklahomans and defunding the state’s public schools.

Ring the Bad Guy alarm! Disgraced former president Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows testified before a federal grand jury as part of DOJ’s ongoing investigation of Trump’s theft of classified government documents as well as his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. 

Surprise, surprise: after pretending for the past six goddamn months that the government needs to “rein in government spending to reduce the deficit,” what’s Republicans’ first order of business now that they’ve released the debt-limit hostage? You guessed it! Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, one of the largest contributors to the national debt. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission sued the country’s largest cryptocurrency platform Coinbase on Tuesday for failing to register as an exchange and therefore operating illegally. 

Legal counsel for wretched billionaire and Clarence Thomas’s benefactor Harlan Crow have agreed to speak with the Senate Judiciary Committee about Crow’s relationship with Thomas, after initially rebuffing requests from the panel. Don’t worry, though, he’s still blowing off the Senate Finance Committee.

Protests against pension reform in France are still going strong(!) and even made their way to the headquarters of the Paris 2024 Olympics on Tuesday. 

In a so-dumb-it’s-funny turn of events, 11 members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus joined all Democrats to kill a pair of GOP bills to “protect gas stoves” (lol) in a move to punish House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for cutting a debt ceiling deal with President Biden instead of forcing the country into recession. 

Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino logged her first (and second) day at the beleaguered and devalued social-media company. Welcome to hell, Linda!

A Pennsylvania appellate court ruled that the government cannot ban people convicted of non-violent crimes from owning guns. 


The PGA Tour and LIV Golf (the league that sprung up out of nowhere bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund) unexpectedly announced a merger after months of fighting for top billing in men’s professional golf. Saudi Arabia has been staggeringly successful in buying its way into the global sports arena in recent years.


Former New Jersey Governor and Trump-sycophant-turned-critic Chris Christie will, hilariously, announce his bid for the White House tonight in New Hampshire. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is somewhere visibly shaking.

Twitter owner and plague on all of our houses Elon Musk has, for many months, been peddling baseless claims that the United States government forced the company to censor a 2020 New York Post article about Hunter Biden. He hand-picked a group of red-pilled journalists and gave them access to company archives, which they compiled into a series of tendentious reports that became the so-called “Twitter Files.” But now, Twitter’s own lawyers are disputing those claims in court, emphatically rejecting the notion that the Twitter Files demonstrate what Musk and many conservatives rabidly assert they contain. One of the central allegations from the Twitter Files is that regular communications between the FBI and Twitter ahead of the 2020 election amounted to government coercion to censor content, or an even more spurious claim that Twitter had become a conduit of the U.S. government. One of the problems with that theory is that in the fall of 2020, Donald Trump was president, not Joe Biden. The Trump administration made its own requests for removal of content on Twitter, and payments to Twitter from the government have been identified as routine reimbursements for responding to subpoenas and investigations, not for content moderation. Twitter’s lawyers went even further, saying that the communications show no proof of coercion “because they do not contain a specific government demand to remove the content — let alone one backed by the threat of government sanction.”

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A federal judge in Florida partially blocked the state from enforcing its ban on gender-affirming health care for transgender minors. 

Almost 98 percent of Screen Actors Guild members voted to authorize joining the Writers Guild of America on strike if studios continue railroading contract negotiations.

Lawmakers in Michigan are considering a set of bills to ban the practice of conversion therapy for minors. 

Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) has vetoed 106 GOP bills in her first year as governor, including one bill criminalizing homelessness and another that would have banned ranked-choice voting.