Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 2
November 25, 2025
November 24, 2025
November 24, 2025
U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie of South Carolina today dismissed the indictments of former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, ruling that President Donald J. Trump’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was invalid.
Trump had demanded the indictment of the two. When he was FBI director, Comey had refused to drop an investigation into Trump’s then–national security advisor Mike Flynn, who had lied to the FBI about his conversations with a Russian operative before Trump took office. James had successfully sued Trump, several of his children, and the Trump Organization for fraud, and when the interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Seibert, said there was not enough evidence to indict them, Trump forced him out of office and replaced him with Halligan, a former insurance lawyer and Trump aide.
Within days, Halligan obtained a grand jury indictment for Comey, charging him with lying to Congress, and another for James, charging her with alleged mortgage fraud. As David Kurtz points out in Talking Points Memo, the indictments were widely understood to be targeted prosecutions of those Trump considered enemies.
By law, after a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney leaves the job, the attorney general can appoint an interim U.S. attorney for 120 days. If the position still has not been filled, the right to make another interim appointment goes to the district court, which has sole authority over the position until the Senate confirms a president’s nominee. This provision prevents a president from making an end run around the Senate’s duty to advise and consent by making consecutive 120-day appointments.
The Trump administration attempted to thwart this law. Trump appointed Seibert the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia on January 21, and as the 120-day deadline approached, he nominated Seibert for the position. The district judges voted unanimously to keep Siebert on as the interim U.S. attorney as his nomination proceeded. But then Siebert declined to prosecute Comey and James, and Trump forced him out, pushing Attorney General Pam Bondi to put Halligan into his place as a new interim appointment.
Today, Currie found that Halligan’s appointment violated not only the law, but also the appointment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which requires the president to obtain the “advice and consent of the Senate” for such appointments. That unlawful appointment means that all of Halligan’s actions undertaken as a U.S. attorney are invalid. Because she was the only prosecutor to sign off on the Comey and James prosecutions, they, too, are invalid.
Currie wrote that if the indictments were to stand, “the Government could send any private citizen off the street—attorney or not—into the grand jury room to secure an indictment so long as the Attorney General gives her approval after the fact. That cannot be the law.”
After the judge’s decision, Comey posted a video saying that while the case mattered to him personally, “it matters most because a message has to be sent that the president of the United States cannot use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies. I don’t care what your politics are. You have to see that as fundamentally un-American and a threat to the rule of law that keeps all of us free.” He called for Americans to “stand up and show the fools who would frighten us, who would divide us, that we’re made of stronger stuff, that we believe in the rule of law, that we believe in the importance of doing things by the law.”
Attorney General Bondi said the government will “be taking all available legal action, including an immediate appeal.”
Shut down by the courts, Trump is turning to military justice to enforce his will.
Since six lawmakers released a video last week reminding servicemembers that they must refuse to carry out unlawful orders, Trump and his loyalists have continued to insist that such a reminder is “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR… punishable by DEATH!”
Their argument appears to be that by reiterating the law, the lawmakers implied that Trump has issued unlawful orders and therefore that they made troops question their orders and thus directly attacked the chain of command. It’s a convoluted argument, one that administration officials are using to claim that the lawmakers’ reminder that troops must not obey an unlawful order is actually encouragement not to obey lawful orders.
Administration officials insist that the lawmakers’ video is an attack on Trump because all of his orders have been lawful, although lawyers, lawmakers, and military personnel have expressed concerns about the legality of the administration’s deadly strikes on civilians in small boats near Venezuela.
This morning, the administration escalated its attacks on the lawmakers. The social media account of the “Department of War” posted that the department is investigating Captain Mark Kelly, a retired Navy officer who is now a Democratic senator from Arizona and who participated in the video, after “serious allegations of misconduct.” It suggested that Kelly, a retired Navy officer, could be recalled to active duty “for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures.”
Turning to military tribunals harks back to QAnon, a conspiracy theory that took off in 2017. It maintained Trump was leading a fight against an international ring of pedophiles that he would bring to justice through military tribunals. As recently as during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump called for those he perceives to be his enemies to be prosecuted in military tribunals, saying, for example, that former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) was “guilty of treason” because she participated in the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump’s social media page has been reposting QAnon sayings.
Attacking Kelly appeals to Trump’s base, but it was impetuous. As law professor John Pfaff noted: “There’s clearly no adult in the room to say ‘wait, maybe don’t go after the charismatic war hero turned literal astronaut who ran [for office] after his wife was a victim of political violence.’” On social media, a post circulated showing a picture of Kelly in his dress uniform juxtaposed with a photograph of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth guzzling from a bottle; the caption compared Kelly’s “shirt covered with medals” with Hegseth’s “shirt covered with booze.”
Kelly punched back. He posted on Facebook: “When I was 22 years old, I commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy and swore an oath to the Constitution. I upheld that oath through flight school, multiple deployments on the USS Midway, 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm, test pilot school, four space shuttle flights at NASA, and every day since I retired—which I did after my wife Gabby was shot in the head while serving her constituents.
“In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.
“Secretary Hegseth’s tweet is the first I heard of this. I also saw the President’s posts saying I should be arrested, hanged, and put to death.
“If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”
In a conversation with MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow, Kelly was less formal: “I’ve had a missile blow up next to my airplane,” he told her. “I’ve been…nearly shot down multiple times. I’ve flown a rocket ship into space four times, built by the lowest bidder, and my wife Gabby Giffords, meeting with her constituents, shot in the head. Six people killed around her. A horrific thing. She spent six months in the hospital. We know what political violence is, and we know what causes it, too…. The statements that Donald Trump made… incite others…. He should be careful with his words. But I’m not going to be silenced here…. I’m going to show up for work every day, support the Constitution, do my job, hold this administration accountable, hold this president accountable when he is out of line. That’s the responsibility of every U.S. senator and every member of Congress. He’s not going to silence us.”
—
Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/20/nx-s1-5547837/us-attorney-virginia-resigns-letitia-james-probe
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/us/politics/erik-siebert-comey-letitia-james.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/24/halligan-dismissed-james-comey-cases-00667735
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/us/politics/trump-liz-cheney-treason-jail.html
https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-qanon.html
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November 23, 2025
November 23, 2025
“Do I understand correctly that there is now a dispute within the administration about whether this ‘peace plan’ was written by Russians or Americans?” foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum asked last night on social media.
Applebaum was referring to confusion over a 28-point plan for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine reported by Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios last week. After the plan was leaked, apparently to Ravid by Kirill Dmitriev, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who is under U.S. sanctions, Vice President J.D. Vance came out strongly in support of it.
But as scholar of strategic studies Phillips P. OBrien noted in Phillips’s Newsletter, once it became widely known that the plan was written by the Russians, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to back away from it, posting on social media on Wednesday that “[e]nding a complex and deadly war such as the one in Ukraine requires an extensive exchange of serious and realistic ideas. And achieving a durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions. That is why we are and will continue to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict.”
And yet, by Friday, Trump said he expected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to sign onto the plan by Thanksgiving: next Thursday, November 27. Former senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said: “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool. Rewarding Russian butchery would be disastrous to America’s interests.”
Yesterday a group of senators, foreign affairs specialists gathered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the Halifax International Security Forum, told reporters they had spoken to Rubio about the plan. Senator Angus King (I-ME) said Rubio had told them that the document “was not the administration’s position” but rather “a wish list of the Russians.” Senator Mike Rounds (R-SC) said: “This administration was not responsible for this release in its current form.” He added: “I think he made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” Rounds said. “It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan.”
But then a spokesperson for the State Department, Tommy Pigott, called the senators’ account of the origins of the plan “blatantly false,” and Rubio abruptly switched course, posting on social media that in fact the U.S. had written the plan.
Anton La Guardia, diplomatic editor at The Economist, posted: “State Department is backpedalling on Rubio’s backpedal. If for a moment you thought the grown-ups were back in charge, think again. We’re still in the circus. ‘Unbelievable,’ mutters one [of the] disbelieving senators.”
Later that day, Erin Banco and Gram Slattery of Reuters reported that the proposal had come out of a meeting in Miami between Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Dmitriev, who leads one of Russia’s largest sovereign wealth funds. They reported that senior officials in the State Department and on the National Security Council were not briefed about the plan.
This morning, Bill Kristol of The Bulwark reported rumors that Vice President J.D. Vance was “key to US embrace of Russia plan on Ukraine, Rubio (and even Trump) out of the loop.” He posted that relations between Vance and Rubio are “awful” and that Rubio did, in fact, tell the senators what they said he did.
Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, posted: “Foreign nations now have to deal with rival factions of the U.S. government who keep major policy initiatives secret from each other and some of which work with foreign powers as the succession battle for 2028 begins, is how one diplomat put it.”
The elections of 2026 and 2028 are clearly on Republicans’ minds as polls show Trump’s policies to be increasingly unpopular.
On Friday, Trump met at the White House with New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Although Trump had previously called Mamdani a “communist lunatic” and a “stupid person” and had threatened to withhold federal funding from New York City if Mamdani won, the meeting was friendly. Trump, who has seemed warm and affable since snarling “Quiet, Piggy!” to a reporter on Air Force One on November 14, praised the mayor-elect and said he’d “feel very comfortable” living in New York City after Mamdani takes the reins.
Trump’s friendly banter with Mamdani appeared a way to acknowledge voters’ frustration with the economy. During his campaign, Mamdani promised to address those economic frustrations. Trump told reporters: “We agree on a lot more than I thought. I want him to do a great job, and we’ll help him do a great job.” This embrace of a politician MAGA Republicans had attacked as a communist left Trump’s supporters unsure how to respond.
On Friday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced she is resigning from Congress. Her last day will be January 5, 2026, days after she secures her congressional pension. In her four-page announcement, she maintained she was frustrated that those like her, who she said represent “the common American people,” cannot get their measures passed because “the Political Industrial Complex of both Political Parties” ignores them in favor of “[c]orporate and global interests.”
She blamed Trump for forcing her out of Congress, saying: “I have too much self respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms. And in turn, be expected to defend the President against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me.”
Greene appears to be shifting to fit into a post-Trump future. “When the common American people finally realize and understand that the Political Industrial Complex of both parties is ripping this country apart, that not one elected leader like me is able to stop Washington’s machine from gradually destroying our country, and instead the reality is that they, common Americans, The People, possess the real power over Washington,” she wrote, “then I’ll be here by their side to rebuild it.”
Another scandal coming from the Cabinet will not help the administration dig out from its cratering popularity.
Just after midnight Friday night, the former fiancé of the journalist who had a romantic relationship with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped another installment of his version of the saga. It included a graphic pornographic poem that would have ended a cabinet member’s career in any normal administration. The ex-fiancé said other poems he had found were even more explicit.
This revelation came the day after Kennedy acknowledged that he had personally told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to change information on the CDC website to say the claim that vaccines do not cause autism is not “evidence-based.” As Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times notes, Kennedy admits that studies have shown no link between vaccines and autism, but he wanted the change because there are still other studies to be done. As Stolberg wrote, “He said he is not saying vaccines cause autism; he is simply saying there is no proof that they don’t.”
Kennedy is neither a doctor nor a scholar of public health, and Stolberg notes that “[i]t is highly unusual for a health secretary to personally order a change to scientific guidance.”
In order to get support for his cabinet nomination, Kennedy promised Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician, that he would not remove from the CDC website a statement saying that vaccines do not cause autism. That statement is still at the top of the “Autism and Vaccines” page of the CDC website, but now it has an asterisk keyed to a footnote saying it had not been removed because of Kennedy’s promise to Cassidy, and the text of the page says that “studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
Today, CNN’s Jake Tapper said to Cassidy: “He lied to you.” Cassidy answered: “Well, first let me say, what is most important to the American people, speaking as a physician, vaccines are safe. As has been pointed out, it’s actually not disputed. It’s actually quite well proven that vaccines are not associated with autism. There’s a fringe out there that thinks so, but they’re quite a fringe. President Trump agrees that vaccines are safe.”
Cassidy tried to suggest that focusing on Kennedy’s lie was “titillating” but that Americans needed to move on. Tapper answered: “This isn’t about titillation. This is about the fact that you are the chairman of the health committee and you voted to confirm somebody that by all accounts from the medical and scientific community and his own family…is actually making America less healthy.”
—
Notes:
https://www.axios.com/2025/11/19/ukraine-peace-plan-trump-russia-witkoff
Foreign Office by Michael Weiss“He Must Have Got This From K.”Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images…Read more3 days ago · 254 likes · 27 comments · Foreign Officehttps://okmagazine.com/p/robert-f-ken...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/us/politics/rfk-jr-cdc-vaccines-autism-website.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/11/23/trump-maga-congress-greene-gop/
Phillips’s NewsletterWeekend Update #160: The US Becomes A Mouthpiece To Pass On Putin's DemandsPhillips’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…Read morea day ago · 371 likes · 92 comments · Phillips P. OBrienhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/11/21/trump-mamdani-oval-office/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/21/epstein-mbs-khashoggi-inflation-quiet-piggy/
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November 22, 2025
November 22, 2025
On Tuesday, six Democratic lawmakers, themselves veterans of the U.S. military or intelligence services, released a video telling service members that they would stand behind them as they refused to obey unlawful orders.
On Thursday, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media that the message in the video was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand—We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.” He followed that post with another saying: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He has continued to attack the lawmakers over the past two days.
For the president of the United States of America to call elected lawmakers traitors and demand they be arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for making statements he perceives as threats to his policies is bizarre, outrageous, and anti-American. But it is not unprecedented.
In 1866, President Andrew Johnson accused Republicans of trying to overthrow the government, called congressmen traitors, and called for them to be hanged.
A former tailor from Tennessee, Johnson considered himself the representative of poor white men who he believed had been crushed before the Civil War by the elite southern enslavers who dominated the economy. Johnson opposed their rising oligarchy, but that did not mean he had any interest in protecting the rights—or even the lives—of formerly enslaved Black Americans.
Johnson was a southern Democrat who hated the congressional Republicans who wanted to protect Black rights and rebuild the nation on the basis of free labor. He thought they were expanding the federal government mostly to keep their party in power permanently, while the taxes their new bureaucracy required to protect Black Americans would destroy poor whites by raising taxes.
Elevated to the White House by the death of President Abraham Lincoln, Johnson intended to “restore” the Union much as it had been before the war except for the abolition of enslavement, an abolition he strongly supported because he believed slavery was what had enabled elite southern planters to amass their fortunes. Because Congress had adjourned in March and was not scheduled to reconvene until the following December, Johnson had free rein for eight months to rebuild the nation as he wished.
In summer 1865 he told the governors of the former Confederate states to organize new constitutional conventions and then he required those conventions to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, ending human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for crime, nullify the ordinance of secession, and repudiate the Confederate war debts, essentially defaulting on loans so that future rebels would find it hard to raise money to fund their rebellion.
They did so—more or less—but then went on to pass “Black Codes,” laws that differed from state to state but that generally pushed Black Americans back into subservience to their white neighbors. The codes bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working for white men, prohibited them from owning guns or gathering in groups, demanded submissive behavior, and permitted corporal punishment for those failing to obey the codes.
Black Americans had no right to vote to challenge these laws, and no right to sit on juries or to testify in court. So they were at the mercy of any white man who cheated them or any gang that raped, assaulted, or murdered freedpeople.
When southern states held elections to send representatives to Congress in fall 1865, voters reelected old leaders who had led the South out of the Union in 1861, including Alexander Stephens of Georgia, the former vice president of the Confederacy. In late November 1865, these southern leaders traveled to Washington, D.C., to take their seats in Congress.
On December 4, Johnson greeted the new Congress by congratulating it that Reconstruction was over. While congress members had been out of session, he explained, he had reorganized the former Confederate states. All that was left to do to restore the government was for Congress to seat the South’s representatives. They were already in Washington, D.C., marveling at the changes the war had wrought in what was, just four years before, a sleepy southern town.
Republicans were appalled by Johnson’s “restoration,” recognizing that it delivered Black Americans who had fought for the United States into the hands of those men who had fought to destroy it. Johnson was permitting southerners who had lost the war to win the peace. The Chicago Tribune declared: “The men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog-pond before they will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves.”
Congress rejected Johnson’s solution to reconstruct the nation. There was no way northern lawmakers were going to rebuild southern society on the old, pre–Civil War blueprint, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states even more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it.
Congress refused to seat the southern delegates. Then, to come up with their own plan for reconstruction, congressmen appointed a committee of thirteen lawmakers as the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. After months of hearings and deliberation, the committee proposed to reconstruct the nation on an entirely new basis. At the end of April 1866, it called for amending the Constitution for the fourteenth time.
They wrote an amendment that began by reiterating the Constitution had provided that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This was an explicit rejection of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that denied Black Americans could be U.S. citizens.
Then it said: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” This outlawed the discriminatory laws put in place in southern states under the Black Codes and said the federal government would guarantee that states could not pass legislation that gave some citizens more rights than others.
The new amendment gave Congress the power to “enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provision of this article.”
Congress required southern states to ratify the amendment before being readmitted to the Union.
Johnson hated the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. He hated its broad definition of citizenship; he hated its protection of equal rights within the states; he hated its assertion of the power of the federal government to protect that equality.
So Johnson told southern politicians to ignore Congress’s order to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. He assured them that Democrats would win the 1866 midterm elections and that once back in power, Democrats could repudiate Republican “radicalism” and allow Johnson’s plan for reconstruction of the Union to proceed.
Johnson’s position energized ex-Confederates, who made the summer of 1866 a bloody one. In July, when a Unionist convention in New Orleans called for taking the vote away from former Confederates and giving it to loyal Black Americans, white mobs attacked the building where the convention was in session. The ensuing riots killed thirty-seven Black delegates and three white delegates to the convention.
Rather than condemning the violence in the South, Johnson egged it on. After denouncing Congress as an illegal body—because it had not seated southern representatives— and saying Republican lawmakers were trying to undermine the Constitution, he decided to rally voters to his side before the 1866 midterm elections with a speaking campaign. In August 1866 he set out on a “Swing Around the Circle,” speaking at rallies on a circuit from Washington to New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and back through the Ohio River valley to the capital.
In February, shortly after congressional Republicans had rejected his plan for reconstruction, Johnson had suggested that those Republicans were trying to overthrow the government and were no better than the Confederates. But on September 4, 1866, he went further. In Cleveland, Ohio, facing a crowd heckling him for his stand against Congress, Johnson called those who opposed his plan for reconstruction “traitors” and suggested they should be hanged.
It was a stunning moment. Just a year after the end of the devastating civil war, a president had called for hanging members of Congress because they did not support his policies.
Americans wanted no part of it. Johnson’s extremism and his supporters’ violence created a backlash. Northerners were not willing to hand control of the country to the former Confederates rioting in the South and a president who called for the hanging of congressmen. Rather than rebuking the Republicans in the midterm elections as Johnson had predicted, voters repudiated Johnson. They stood behind the principles in the Fourteenth Amendment and gave Republicans a two-thirds majority of Congress.
Now firmly in control of rebuilding the South, the Republicans worked to make the Fourteenth Amendment a reality. But in every southern state other than Tennessee (where locals so hated their native son Johnson that they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment just to spite him), white men had ignored Congress’s plan for reconstruction.
So, on March 2, 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, which divided the ten unreconstructed southern states into five military districts and, as Johnson’s plan had done, required new constitutional conventions to rewrite the state constitutions. Unlike his plan, though, the new law permitted Black men to vote for delegates to the conventions. It also required the states to guarantee Black male suffrage in their new constitutions and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.
With the Military Reconstruction Act, Republicans asserted that all men, poor and underprivileged as well as rich and educated, should have a say in American government. Leading Republican politician James G. Blaine later reflected that the Military Reconstruction Act was of “transcendent importance and…unprecedented character. It was the most vigorous and determined action ever taken by Congress in time of peace. The effect produced by the measure was far-reaching and radical. It changed the political history of the United States. But it is well to remember that it could never have been accomplished except for the conduct of the Southern leaders.”
On July 9, 1868, the final state ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, making it part of the Constitution of the United States of America.
—
Notes:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-cleveland-ohio-2
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-host-tries-to-justify-trumps-calls-for-dems-hangings/
James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, vol. 2 (Norwich, CT: Henry Bill Publishing, 1893), p. 262.
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November 21, 2025
November 21, 2025
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Ukrainian people today. The current moment, he said, is “one of the most difficult” for the country. “Ukraine may soon face an extremely difficult choice. Either the loss of dignity or the risk of losing a key partner. Either 28 complicated points or the hardest winter yet—and the risks that follow,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky’s use of the word “dignity” recalled Ukraine’s 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” that ousted Russian-aligned president Viktor Yanukovych and turned the country toward Europe.
Zelensky was responding to a 28-point “peace” plan President Donald J. Trump is pressuring him to sign before Thanksgiving, November 27. The plan appears to have been leaked to Barak Ravid of Axios by Kirill Dmitriev, a top ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and reports say it was worked out by Dmitriev and Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff. Ukrainian representatives and representatives from Europe were not included. Laura Kelly of The Hill reported on Wednesday that Congress was blindsided by the proposal, which Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet of The Hill suggest Russia may be pushing now to take advantage of a corruption scandal roiling Ukraine’s government.
Luke Harding of The Guardian noted that the plan appears to have been translated from Russian, as many of the phrases in the text read naturally in that language but are awkward and clunky in English.
The plan is a Russian wish list. It begins by confirming Ukraine’s sovereignty, a promise Russia gave Ukraine in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons but then broke when it invaded Ukraine in 2014.
The plan gives Crimea and most of the territory in Ukraine’s four eastern oblasts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk to Russia, and it limits the size of the Ukrainian military.
It erases any and all accountability for the Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians, including well-documented rape, torture, and murder. It says: “All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.”
It calls for $100 billion in frozen Russian assets to be invested in rebuilding and developing Ukraine. Since the regions that need reconstruction are the ones Russia would be taking, this means that Russian assets would go back to Russia. The deal says that Europe, which was not consulted, will unfreeze Russian assets and itself add another $100 billion to the reconstruction fund. The plan says the U.S. “will receive 50 percent of the profits from this venture,” which appears to mean that Europe will foot the bill for the reconstruction of Ukraine—Russia, if the plan goes through—and the U.S. and Russia will split the proceeds.
The plan asserts that “Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy,” with sanctions lifted and an invitation to rejoin the Group of Seven (G7), an informal group of countries with advanced economies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with the European Union—that meets every year to discuss global issues. Russia was excluded from the group after it invaded Ukraine in 2014, and Putin has wanted back in.
According to the plan, Russia and “[t]he US will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centres, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.”
The plan requires Ukraine to amend its constitution to reject membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It says “[a] dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the US, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.”
Not only does this agreement sell out Ukraine and Europe for the benefit of Russia—which attacked Ukraine—it explicitly separates the U.S. from NATO, a long-time goal of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
NATO grew out of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. Months before the U.S. entered World War II, U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill and their advisors laid out principles for an international system that could prevent future world wars. They agreed that countries should not invade each other and therefore the world should work toward disarmament, and that international cooperation and trade thanks to freedom of the seas would help to knit the world together with rising prosperity and human rights.
The war killed about 36.5 million Europeans, 19 million of them civilians, and left many of those who had survived homeless or living in refugee camps. In its wake, communism backed by the Soviet Union began to push west into Europe. In 1949, France, the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a military and economic alliance, the Western Union, to work together, but nations understood that resisting Soviet aggression, preventing the revival of European militarism, and guaranteeing international cooperation would require a transatlantic security agreement.
In 1949 the countries of the Western Union joined with the U.S., Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland to make up the twelve original signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty. In it, the countries reaffirmed “their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments” and their determination “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”
They vowed that any attack on one of the signatories would be considered an attack on all, thus deterring war by promising strong retaliation. This system of collective defense has stabilized the world for 75 years. Thirty-two countries are now members, sharing intelligence, training, tactics, equipment, and agreements for use of airspace and bases. In 2024, NATO countries reaffirmed their commitment and said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “gravely undermined global security.”
They did so in the face of Russian aggression.
Putin invaded Crimea in 2014 after Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych, earning economic sanctions and expulsion from what was then the G8. But Crimea wasn’t enough: he wanted Ukraine’s eastern oblasts, the country’s industrial heartland. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the U.S. presidency against Donald Trump in 2016, would never stand for that land grab. But Trump was a different story.
According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, in summer 2016, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort discussed with his business partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, “a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, the plan was for Trump to say he wanted peace in Ukraine and for him to appoint Manafort to be a “special representative” to manage the process. With the cooperation of Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian officials, Manafort would help create
“an autonomous republic” in Ukraine’s industrialized eastern region and would work to have Russian-backed Yanukovych, for whom Manafort had worked previously, “elected to head that republic.”
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018. Putin has been determined to control that land ever since. And now it appears Russia is pushing Trump to deliver it.
This plan, complete with its suggestion that the U.S. is no longer truly a part of NATO but can broker between NATO and Russia, would replace the post–World War II rules-based international order with a new version of an older order. In the world before NATO and the other international institutions that were created after World War II, powerful countries dominated smaller countries, which had to do as their powerful neighbors demanded in order to survive.
—
Notes:
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5614066-trump-28-point-ukraine-peace-plan/
https://www.axios.com/2025/11/19/trump-ukraine-peace-plan-russia-donbas
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp
https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/nato-history/a-short-history-of-nato
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections, ICA 2017-01D, January 6, 2017, at https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-documents-report-volume5.pdf (pp. vi, 99)
https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl (pp. 139–140)
Foreign Office by Michael Weiss“He Must Have Got This From K.”Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images…Read more21 hours ago · 64 likes · 8 comments · Foreign Officehttps://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-corruption-scandal-6e33b63b8071f46140956d4d23ab00de
November 20, 2025
November 20, 2025
Trump spent this morning calling a group of military veterans in Congress traitors and saying they “should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” Their crime, in Trump’s eyes, was their release Tuesday of a video reminding military and intelligence officers that they must refuse illegal orders.
The video features Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), and Representatives Chris Deluzio (D-PA), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), and Jason Crow (D-CO). Slotkin is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. Kelly was a captain in the U.S. Navy. Deluzio served in the U.S. Navy. Goodlander is a former intelligence officer. Houlahan served in the Air Force. Crow is a former paratrooper and Army Ranger.
Speaking in turns in the video, the lawmakers say: “We want to speak directly to members of the military and the intelligence community who take risks each day to keep Americans safe. We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now. Americans trust their military, but that trust is at risk. This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens.
“Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders; you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution. We know this is hard and that it’s a difficult time to be a public servant. But whether you’re serving in the CIA, the Army, our Navy, the Air Force, your vigilance is critical.”
“Know that we have your back, because now, more than ever, the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution, and who we are as Americans.
They end with the famous line delivered by Captain James Lawrence, who commanded USS Chesapeake in 1813 when it engaged in a naval battle with HMS Shannon during the War of 1812. In the battle, Lawrence was mortally wounded. As his men carried him below, he ordered:
“Don’t give up the ship.”
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller promptly posted on social media, “Democrat lawmakers are now openly calling for insurrection,” but Trump did not appear to notice the video yesterday when he was entertaining Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, known as MBS, at the White House. But something had called his attention to it by last night—perhaps Crow’s appearance on Martha MacCallum’s Fox News Channel show last night in which his advocacy for the military appeared to throw her off balance.
Trump reposted comments from a Washington Examiner article about the video that called for the lawmakers to be arrested, “thrown out of their offices,” “frog marched out of their homes at 3:00 AM with FOX News cameras filming the whole thing,” and “charged with sedition.” He reposted “Insurrection. TREASON!” and a message from a user who wrote: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”
At 9:08 this morning, Trump posted, “It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand—We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET. President DJT”
At 9:17 he reposted the Washington Examiner article with the note: “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT”
At 10:21 he posted: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
And so an American president called for the arrest and execution of elected lawmakers.
Restating the law is not sedition, and Fox News Channel legal analyst Andy McCarthy promptly wrote: “There is no insurrection or sedition without the use of force. Disobeying a lawful order is insubordination, not insurrection or sedition. Disobeying an unlawful order is required. That is all.”
Professor of the early American republic Joanne Freeman wrote that she was “[n]ot going to repost DJT’s howling threats against Democratic lawmakers. I’ll just say: 1. We still have free speech here. 2. People can still oppose the president. 3. No—George Washington wouldn’t have hanged the lawmakers because HE WAS VERY CAREFUL TO STAY STRICTLY WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF HIS OFFICE AS PRESIDENT. He didn’t want to be a king or dictator. Plus, he was in his right mind.”
By noon, the White House was doing cleanup. At 1:58, CBS News senior White House and political correspondent Ed O’Keefe reported from Reuters: “TRUMP DOES NOT WANT TO EXECUTE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS, WHITE HOUSE SAYS,” an astonishing sentence to see coming from the government of the United States of America.
Hours later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to defuse the crisis of the president calling for the execution of members of Congress by claiming the Democratic lawmakers were the ones encouraging violence. When asked about it, Leavitt said, “They are literally saying to 1.3 million active duty service members to defy the chain of command, not to follow lawful orders.” A reporter interrupted: “Actually, they said…illegal orders.” Leavitt claimed, “They’re suggesting…that the president has given illegal orders, which he has not. Every single order that has given [sic] to this United States military by this commander-in-chief and through this chain of command through the secretary of war is lawful.”
In fact, Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, and Dan De Luce of NBC News reported yesterday that the senior judge advocate general, or JAG, at U.S. Southern Command in Miami, the command that oversees the U.S. strikes on the small boats near Venezuela, expressed concern that the 82 deaths from the strikes were extrajudicial killings. If so, they would expose service members participating in the operations to legal repercussions.
According to the reporters, the opinion of a command’s top JAG on the legality of a military operation typically would determine whether the operation went forward. It is possible for higher officials to overrule their findings, but their concerns are typically addressed before the operation begins. In this case, though, the reporters write, officials at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department and other senior government officials overruled him.
This new information adds fuel to the concerns of lawyers and lawmakers of both parties about the legality of the boat strikes just as lawmakers are pushing back on the administration’s refusal to honor the 1973 War Powers Act that requires the president to get Congress’s permission to continue strikes for more than 60 days. That deadline passed on November 2, and now the administration appears to be considering a broader assault on Venezuela.
On Tuesday, November 18, Representatives Gregory Meeks (D-NY), top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Adam Smith (D-WA), top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee; Jim Himes (D-CT), top Democrat of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; Bennie Thompson (D-MS), top Democrat of the House Homeland Security Committee; Jason Crow (D-CO), top Democrat of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations; and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) introduced a War Powers Resolution to stop the administration, as they said, “from continuing to use U.S. Armed Forces to conduct strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, operations the administration has carried out for more than 60 days without congressional authorization.”
In the last week, Trump’s iron grip on congressional Republicans has appeared to be slipping. All but one member of Congress voted for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and then enough Republicans crossed the aisle to sign a second discharge petition to force a House vote on a bipartisan bill to repeal Trump’s executive order stripping union protections from federal workers. If there is anything but a demand for absolute power behind his insistence that Democrats are traitors, it might be a hope of winning wavering Republicans away from budding bipartisanship and back to his MAGA standard.
Some Trump loyalists did indeed jump to the president’s defense. More stayed silent.
After Trump’s threats, the six lawmakers who made the video—Slotkin, Kelly, Deluzi0, Goodlander, Houlahan, and Crow—issued a statement:
“We are veterans and national security professionals who love this country and swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. That oath lasts a lifetime, and we intend to keep it. No threat, intimidation, or call for violence will deter us from that sacred obligation.
“What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law. Our servicemembers should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty.
“But this isn’t about any one of us. This isn’t about politics. This is about who we are as Americans. Every American must unite and condemn the President’s calls for our murder and political violence. This is a time for moral clarity.
“In these moments, fear is contagious, but so is courage. We will continue to lead and will not be intimidated.
“Don’t Give Up the Ship!”
—
Notes:
https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-people/l/lawrence-james.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-host-tries-to-justify-trumps-calls-for-dems-hangings/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crl2g195n96o
https://www.justsecurity.org/123844/war-powers-resolution-venezuela-boat-strikes/
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