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Illustration by Nazario Graziano for POLITICO; Photos by AP, Getty Images, iStock | A year ago today, on February 24, 2022, Russian tanks tore through the border in Ukraine, leaving the post-WWII era of a peaceful Europe bleeding in its wake. The world was stunned. And yet, following months of rising tensions and aggression from Vladimir Putin, the invasion was anything but surprising. Here at home, an administration already bruised by the collapse of Afghanistan into Taliban rule began to see on the horizon perhaps the greatest foreign policy challenge of our time. “I always had that in the back of my mind — Russia is potentially very, very dangerous.” —Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, director, Defense Intelligence Agency “The storm clouds were starting to gather many months before the invasion.” —Antony Blinken, U.S. secretary of State “This was the run-up to war.” —Rep. Adam Schiff, chair, House Intelligence Committee Based on dozens of hours of original interviews with more than 30 key figures from the U.S. government and Western allies, POLITICO Magazine has compiled the first-ever, firsthand account of how Washington scrambled to avert war, and how it reacted when Putin went ahead and invaded anyway — the inside story, told by the people who were in the room, in their own words. “We were increasingly accumulating a picture that made clear: ‘Yes, this was a real option that they were considering.’” —Avril Haines, director of National Intelligence “It was going to be messy and ugly and horrific.” —John Sullivan, U.S. ambassador to Russia, Moscow “Fourth of February, I’m watching the Olympics, watching President Putin and President Xi meeting in Beijing. I’m thinking to myself, ‘Hey, I wonder if President Putin is going to let him in on the secret that he’s going to invade Ukraine?’” —Gen. Paul Nakasone, director, National Security Agency, and commander, U.S. Cyber Command “We wanted to make sure the world was wide awake.” Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, White House Read the story.
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| “A strutting pedagogue.” Can you guess who said this about President Woodrow Wilson? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**
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Aerial photo of the Washington Monument with the Capitol in the background in Washington, D.C. | Andy Dunaway/Getty Images | Could D.C. Overreach Set the Statehood Movement Back? … For national Democrats, supporting D.C. statehood has been a no-brainer for years. But new measures out of the D.C. City Council that lower mandatory sentencing for certain crimes and allow non-citizens to vote in local elections — too progressive for Mayor Muriel Bowser, but the council overrode her veto — will be ready-made cudgels for Congressional Republicans looking to slam national Democrats as softies, and that might put them on their heels when it comes to supporting D.C. statehood. Shadow Senator Michael D. Brown, who was elected to that (unpaid, non-voting) position to lobby for the district’s right to self-government, says these are the wrong battles to pick at the wrong time — and the council “reminded me of my teenagers,” he tells Michael Schaffer. In this week’s Capital City column, Schaffer pokes at the sore spot between city-as-hometown and city-as-national-capital.
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| 70 percent … of Trump 2020 voters say it is somewhat (27 percent) or very (43 percent) important for the 2024 Republican nominee to be someone under the age of 70.
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| |  Ukrainian photographer Serhii Korovayny spent time in Donbas before Russia's full-scale invasion, and he returned there earlier this month to document how the region has changed. | Photos by Serhii Korovayny for POLITICO | Photos: Donbas Then and Now … Russia invaded the Ukrainian Donbas region in 2014, occupying about half of it, but life in the Ukrainian-controlled area continued in some version of normalcy: People went to school, opened businesses, made music. Then Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale war, drawing frontlines of bloody conflict through the Donbas — no other region has seen more fighting over the last year. For photographer Serhii Korovayny, who spent time in the Donbas before the war, returning there earlier this month was a study in terrible contrast between the cheerful towns of then and the utter devastation of now.
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| Did you miss this week’s brief but controversial media tour by Emily Kohrs, the foreperson of the special grand jury in Fulton County that investigated efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results? Here are some pointers that will help you sound like a savvy legal insider if it comes up this weekend. (From Ankush Khardori) - Don’t get spun by Trump and his supporters like many political reporters did this week. Trump’s lawyers have threatened to move to dismiss any charges as a result of Kohrs’s comments, but what exactly would the basis for that motion be? (Even Trump’s lawyers don’t know!) - Don’t make snippy comments about Kohrs’s demeanor in her TV appearances or insinuate that she came across as immature. It’s rude — she’s a 30-year-old woman who doesn’t work in media or politics — and also beside the point. - Make sure to point out that Kohrs was only on the special grand jury. District Attorney Fani Willis will have to present any proposed charges against Trump to an entirely different grand jury. Never mind that a third jury — the trial jury — would then independently hear the evidence and the defense. - Use the phrase “petit jury” to refer to the trial jury. - Throw in Mark Pomerantz, too, and lament the fact that some segments of the media will indulge or promote anyone if it serves the greater cause of putting Trump in prison. - The smartest and most accurate take? Kohrs’s comments aren’t exactly helpful for the D.A.’s office, but the odds that a future indictment would be dismissed as a result of them are very low.
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Democrat Frank Church, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, holds up a poison dart gun during a session on the Central Intelligence Agency in 1975. | Henry Griffin/AP Photo | The GOP’s Church Committee Wannabes … The GOP has compared Rep. Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to the post-Watergate era Church Committee, which unveiled U.S. intelligence agencies’ shocking and criminal abuses of power and brought about historic reforms. But really, they’re nothing alike, argues historian Joshua Zeitz: “Compared to the Church Committee, which investigated on a bipartisan basis … the Jordan Committee seems to have one objective: Get Democrats.”
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Center Street/Hachette Book Group | Inside the Times for the Fall of James Bennet … In his new book, Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People, Steve Krakauer, the executive producer of the Megyn Kelly Show, digs into some of the most controversial media stories of the Trump era. Among them: The backlash to Sen. Tom Cotton’s op-ed in the Times, originally headlined “Send in the Troops,” that culminated in the resignation of opinion editor James Bennet. Krakauer, no fan of the anti-Bennet reaction inside the Times, talked to New York Magazine’s Shawn McCreesh, who was then an opinion staffer at the paper, about how all played out in the newsroom, from McCreesh’s perspective. Here’s the excerpt: “There was like this giant communal Slack chat for the whole company that became sort of the digital gallows,” [McCreesh] told me. “And all these angry backbiting staffers were gathering there and demanding that heads roll and the most bloodthirsty of the employees were these sort of weird tech and audio staffers and then a handful of people who wrote for like the Arts and Leisure section, and the Style section, and the magazine, which, in other words, you know, it was no one who was actually out covering any of the protests or the riots or the politics. … Before we knew it we were in all these series of town hall meetings basically watching James Bennet defend himself before the Star Chamber, and it was awful,” McCreesh said. … “The worst part was that a lot of the people who were stabbing James in the front were the ones that he hired and brought to the newspaper,” said McCreesh. “It was like Caesar on the floor of the Roman Senate or something. … I remember closing my laptop and pouring a huge glass of wine even though it was at like noon. Because I was so fucking freaked out by what we had just witnessed.”
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French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, U.S. President Gerald Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and French Foreign Minister Jean Sauvagnargues relax in the pool at a hotel in Martinique on Dec. 15, 1974. | Corbis via Getty Images | President Ford was a devoted swimmer and would take a dip whenever he could, even during work trips overseas. On Dec. 15, 1974 he met with French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing in Martinique, French West Indies, for the first time. After a formal meeting with the French president, Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean Sauvagnarguesand and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he flew to the Leyritz Plantation Hotel, where the four of them were captured in this photo, relaxing in the pool. While serving in Congress, Ford practiced swimming twice a day at his backyard pool in Alexandria, Virginia. After he became president, his passion for swimming resulted in the construction of an outdoor pool at the White House, which was completed in July 1975. (The White House previously had an indoor pool, built for Franklin D. Roosevelt, but President Richard Nixon covered it with the press briefing room to accommodate TV news in 1970.) The White House Swimming Pool Committee oversaw the collection of private donations that funded the project. Among the justifications for building a pool were “the president’s health” and the idea that the pool would be used by future first families. Jimmy Carter’s daughter, Amy, would frequently take a plunge, as would Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama smoked cigarettes by the pool’s cabana in the early months of his presidency.
| | | **Who Dissed answer: That would be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, poking fun at Wilson as a former professor and college president. politicoweekend@email.politico.com | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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