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President Biden met with Vladimir Putin at a carefully choreographed Geneva summit on Wednesday, as Republicans suffered a bout of mass amnesia regarding their own party’s history with Putin, and congressional Democrats cheerfully agreed not to remind them.
- The choreography broke down somewhat as the meeting kicked off, with members of the press getting into a good old-fashioned melee, and the White House stepping in to clarify a misinterpreted nod from Biden. The leaders were expected to spend four to five hours discussing nuclear arms control, cyberattacks, and human rights, among other issues, but the meeting wrapped up after about three hours.
- Putin held the first solo press conference after the summit, calling the talks “quite constructive,” and announcing that he and Biden had agreed to return their ambassadors to their respective posts and to begin discussions on cybersecurity. Putin also, y’know, Putin-ed: He continued to deny any responsibility for election interference and cyberattacks, defended Alexey Navalny’s prison sentence, and served up a heaping platter of whataboutism rather than defend his regime.
- Biden, for his part, said that he would continue to press Putin to respect human rights, and had given him a list of 16 items that he considered to be critical infrastructure and that should be considered off-limits for cyberattacks. Biden said that he hadn’t delivered any ultimatums, but warned Putin that the U.S. would respond to any further cyberattacks or attempted election interference, and that there would be “devastating” consequences if Navalny were to die in prison. (Presumably Biden would, at the very least, take back his crystal bison and custom aviators.)
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Ahead of the meeting, the GOP and Fox News bonked their heads together with great force and were suddenly overcome with sincere concern about Biden being insufficiently tough on Russia.
- Or they’re just gleefully full of shit; you be the judge! RNC Communications Director Danielle Alvarez released a statement on Wednesday arguing, with a perfectly straight face, that "giving Putin a meeting is just the latest win that Joe Biden has handed Russia.” A day earlier, Fox News’s website published Mike Pompeo’s lament about Biden’s “self-dealt weak hand,” and a day before that, Sean Hannity declared, without a hint of irony, that Putin “will see firsthand how weak Joe is,” which is of course very bad, because “Putin loves a weak America and a weak American president.”
- It was less than three years ago that Donald Trump was so stunningly deferential to Putin at a joint press conference in Helsinki—where he submissively accepted Putin’s denials of election interference over the findings of the U.S. intelligence community—that Trump’s former top Russia advisor Fiona Hill now recalls that she “looked around to see if there was a fire alarm” to cut it short. But Republicans aren’t the only ones stuffing it down the memory hole. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks (D-NY) said Wednesday that his panel would no longer seek records of Trump’s private meetings with Putin: “The Biden administration is looking forward, not back.”
While the White House carefully set low expectations for the summit, which was never likely to transform the U.S.-Russia relationship, Americans at least didn’t have to worry about what self-serving deals Biden might be making behind closed doors. That shouldn’t cancel out our right to know the truth of what happened in our names for the previous four years.
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Here’s a glimmer of hope for (key parts of) the For The People Act (maybe): Sen. Joe Mancin (D-WV) has circulated an outline of the provisions he supports and opposes, suggesting that he’d be open to voting for a modified bill. His Majesty is in favor of ending partisan gerrymandering, mandating at least two weeks of early voting, and making Election Day a holiday, but he’d also like to include a voter-ID requirement. As manifestly racist as ID requirements are, it would probably be a blow worth taking: Manchin's ID proposal is reportedly less restrictive than the ones that Republicans have enacted at the state level, and Democrats almost certainly can’t keep the House next year without redistricting reform, making it the most urgent matter on the table. The bigger problem is that Manchin thinks he can find 10 Republicans to support that compromise, and hasn’t made any noises about ending the filibuster if he can’t. Senate Democrats are expected to discuss the next steps at a caucus meeting on Thursday.
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- The coronavirus death toll in the U.S. has surpassed 600,000.
- That mind-boggling number can overshadow the ongoing predicament of many more survivors: Nearly a quarter of American coronavirus patients have sought medical treatment for new conditions, according to a new study.
- A Trump-appointed federal judge has blocked President Biden’s ban on new oil and gas leases on federal land. The Interior Department said it would “comply with the decision,” without noting any plans to appeal the ruling.
- Twenty-one House Republicans voted against legislation to award the Congressional Gold Medal to officers who defended the Capitol. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who was among them, has gone the extra offensive mile of saying that the Capitol Police “executed” Ashli Babbitt, and that an officer was “lying in wait” for her.
- On Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson floated the cool new conspiracy theory that the January 6 attack by self-identified Trump supporters was actually the work of the FBI. On Wednesday, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-SEX CRIMES) demanded that FBI Director Chris Wray answer his questions about that conspiracy theory. And lo, a disinformation campaign is born.
- Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), having a profoundly normal one, has warned the Biden administration that China plans to harvest the DNA of American athletes at the 2022 Winter Olympics.
- Nearly one in five election officials have received threats to their lives, according to a new survey by the Brennan Center.
- The Justice Department has closed its Trump-era criminal investigation into whether former national security advisor John Bolton’s memoir
was too mean to Donald Trump illegally disclosed classified information. DOJ has also dropped the civil lawsuit targeting Bolton.
- Stop the presses! Jared Kushner has scored a book deal! Do not restart the presses!
- Utah Assistant Attorney General Steven Wuthrich has apologized for telling a Salt Lake City council member to “kindly die and go to hell” in an email, after the council member allegedly disturbed his nap. Insane and unprofessional, but an objectively perfect follow-up to “I hope this email finds you well.”
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As Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs begs Senate Democrats to quit flopping around and protect future elections, her state could be shaping up to become the next QAnon mob target. On Monday, the FBI released a warning that some QAnon adherents, deprived of new Q posts to pore over and frustrated by Trump’s failure to sail back into office on a wave of promised mass arrests, might be inclined to turn to real-world violence. That warning was echoed in the White House’s Tuesday strategy document on addressing domestic terrorism. The looming end of the chaotic “audit” in Maricopa County is exactly the kind of focal point that could attract that crowd, and if it’s successful in sowing more election doubt, other state-level reviews will be close behind. While a propensity for violence is (hopefully) limited to a smallish community of kooks, the underlying delusion is widespread: A slight majority of Republicans say they believe that the audits will reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, according to a new Morning Consult/Politico poll.
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The Education Department will issue guidance that discrimination against gay and transgender students is prohibited under Title IX.
The Justice Department has ended a Trump-era policy that made it nearly impossible for people to seek asylum in the U.S. over credible fears of domestic abuse or gang violence.
Arkansas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Jones is the first Black man to run for governor in the state in over a century.
Multnomah County, OR, has become one of the first municipalities to use money from the American Rescue Plan to fund gun-violence prevention.
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