The Bulwark Podcast - Ben Wittes: A Defiant Ukraine

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

Trump may keep telling Ukrainians their country is about to collapse, and Putin may keep bombing their power plants—leaving them miserably cold during one of the harshest winters in years— but Ukrainians are not giving up, and they’re not backing down. On the streets of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa, Ben found defiance, the will to fight and survive, and a still lingering sentimental attachment to America. But during his recent visit, he also felt embarrassed to be American because of our own resident bully who constantly manufactures faux problems for us to fight about—like the 2020 Fulton County vote count, yet again. Plus, the disorganization and staff shortages in the US Attorneys offices and a tribute from a former Postie to the great news organization Jeff Bezos is vandalizing.

Welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Couldn't be happier to welcome back to the show. The editor-in-chief of Lawfare, senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings. He also writes dog shirt daily on Substack. It is Benjamin with us, of course. Hey, man, how's it been? How you been? I'm good, thanks. I've been out of the country while they've been shooting people in the streets. And so, you know, I feel like I caught a lucky break. Yeah. You know, with the lights that you're shining on the buildings. DC. You never know what kind of masgoon might be coming for you these days. Just for listeners, we're pre-taping this Tuesday evening, just in case, I don't know, Donald Trump poops on something

overnight or whatever. This is my final podcast in this Godforsaken hotel room. We'll be seeing people in Minneapolis, though, next week. So I guess I'll be in another hotel room. Ben, you've been aforementioned out of the country. You've been in Ukraine. And I've got a bunch of stuff I want to talk to you about to just get an update on what things are like on the ground there. So why don't you just kick us off? Why don't you cook a little bit on your top reactions, and then we'll kind of go through the elements? Yeah, so the first reaction is that, you know,

the energy crisis situation there is much worse than has been depicted in the press here. We've been understandably distracted by our own turmoil, and I certainly don't begrudge anybody. focus on our own troubles right now. That situation is quite dire. The temperatures are really, really low, and the average building in major cities may have neither heat nor electricity nor running water because a lot of heating in Ukraine is piped in from centralized facilities. This is a kind of legacy of the communist period, so individual buildings don't have boilers of their own a lot of the time. Electricity for the same reason. The Russians have been hitting electrical plants, hitting

heating plants. And then, of course, it's so cold that if you don't have heating and electricity, the pipes freeze very quickly. You know, it was between zero and negative five, negative seven degrees for a lot of the time that I was there. And you can get dead real fast outside. You know, and a lot of people's apartments are freezing inside. And so it's a quite dangerous situation that is being intentionally inflicted on a civilian population. So that is the first big thing

that people should know. Quite apart from everything you read on the news about how the war is going, there is a humanitarian crisis going on. And if you're not in a building, with a generator, if you're not in one of the shishi cafes that, you know, all of these towns still have and that are still operating, you're really cold. The second thing is, you know, despite what Trump is saying every few weeks, the Ukrainians are not about to collapse. And, you know,

he keeps saying you have no cards. He keeps talking to them and talking about them as though you know, unless they kiss his ass, they are going to cease to exist tomorrow. And this is just not true, you know, it is an awful situation, but it is not a situation in which they are on the verge of collapse. It's not a situation in which they're being muscled either by the Russians or, frankly, by us into a precipitous deal that will be bad for them. And, you know, they're in a situation in which their resources are stretched extremely thin, but the other side's resources are also stretched extremely thin. The Russians have lost just an unbelievable number of people, and their gains that they are making are really slow, really incremental, and with really,

really high body counts. And I spent, you know, some time in Kyiv, sometime in Kharkiv, which is, you know, right up against the front and sometime in Odessa. You know, the conditions in different parts of the country are very different. But I did not have the impression that, you know, we are looking at the end stage of this war. A lot there. Let's talk about the energy part of it first, because, you know, you hate to make this about media criticism, right? But, like, there really isn't a lot of attention being put on this right now. I was first brought up to me, I forget if it was by Kalin, who's reporting from out there, I interview from time to time for YouTube or someone else.

And I realize even myself, you know, I kind of checked out of the day-to-day news from the front of the war because people get worn down. Like, there's the new part of news, right? And people get bored. Like, it might not even really be biased. It's just there's other stuff happening. And so I started to like check in more to the key post to just kind of monitor what's happening. And it's a really it's a crisis. And you laid out a lot of it in the details that you're starting a little campaign to help people get battery power, backup power. I want to hear about that. Is this the entire country? Are there any specific anecdotes that jumped out to you? Yeah. So the entire country has an energy problem. And it's an intentionally inflicted energy crisis. The energy crisis is worse in some areas than others.

The more distributed, the power generation is the less of a problem it's going to be. And so, for example, in Kharkiv, which is much closer to the front, but there are many more power plants and they're distributed. The power crisis is actually less than in Kiev, where there are fewer power plants each servicing, wider areas. And that's, by the way, true of some heating, too. It's bad everywhere, and it was really exacerbated by the fact that this is the worst winter they've had in a long time, and it's really, really cold. I mean, Kiev is really bad, and when you're on the left bank in Kiev, this is an area where there's just thousands and thousands of old Soviet apartment blocks. And, you know, each one's 15, 20 stories tall, and they're kind of big and ugly, and they're completely dark.

And then you see a few windows lighted. I snapped a picture of it and posted it on dog shirt daily a few days ago, but you see a few windows lighted, and those are windows where somebody has a battery backup for their lights. And, you know, if you imagine that it's zero degrees outside, that's really cold to not have power. Look, are large numbers of people dying? No. Are large numbers of people miserable? Yes.

There are some people dying, yes. Yes. There have definitely been deaths. There was an old lady who was actually a survivor of Bobby Yarr, the Holocaust in Kyiv, who died in her apartment the other day and, you know, in the cold. It's bad. And, you know, you go to offices and people are there in full winter jackets. You know, you go to schools and people, kids are wearing winter coats inside. It's no joke. And it's maddening partly because it's intentionally inflicted. And I do understand why we are distracted from it. It's not the first front in the war. It's not going to bring down. Ukraine. And let's face it, we have ice operating in the streets of Minnesota where it's also

cold, right? That said, when you see a city that is not built for subsistence living and people are engaged in, you know, subsistence living and building tents on their bed because that adds an added layer of insulation, you know, there's something very evil. about it. There's something very upsetting about it. One of my hosts whom you've met and had on the show, Nastya, you know, their pipes froze and they had to move out of their apartment into a hotel for a few days because not only did they not have power and heat, they didn't have running water anymore either. It's bad. Is there anything on the battery campaign you want to mention? So Nastia and I have, you know, been trying to raise money.

to buy people big hulking batteries that can drive electric blankets and small heaters. And we have now raised $80,000 and spent as much of it as we can get into the country on just buying individual's stuff. And I'm really not sure what else to do, but it really is down to a person to person kind of thing. We'll include the link if you wish in the show notes. That'd be great. I don't know. Eventually you get to a scale where it's like you're like the matching people become a

problem, I assume. This kind of thing that state violence can inflict and only state power can resist. And in this case, God intervened on the side of the Russians and made it super cold. Presumably he will have a change of heart about that come spring. but there's going to be a lot of suffering between now and spring. The Bullwark podcast is brought to you by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. The founders understood something simple when church and state merge, liberty loses. Today's Christian nationalist movement isn't about faith, it's about power and it's deeply un-American.

The Freedom from Religion Foundation defends the First Amendment, so no ideological movement gets to weaponize religion against anyone else. Separation of church and state is about protecting pluralism. You guys know I love pluralism. It's also about restraint. It's about keeping America a place where people with different beliefs or no religious beliefs can all coexist. Visit ffrf.us slash new year or text the word religion to 511-5-11 to learn more and join. Help protect a country that belongs to all of us. Go to ffrf.us slash new year or text religion to 511-511.

Message and data rates apply. I want to hear about Harjeev because, as I mentioned, I've talked to Kalen, a bunch. She's kind of reported about life in Kiev, which I think we hear a lot about Odessa, Yisadurana, if you want to talk about that too. That's almost like a vacation city, I guess, on the coast. And I've seen some reporting from there. Harkev, that was right on the front. And I do wonder, like, is life even continuing there? Like, what is life like?

Do people go to work? Like, what is the, what's the situation? Yeah, so, you know, people go to work. People get up in the morning and have days. and there are very few buildings that are not scarred. And I mean, some of them are scarred in the sense of they just have a few blown out windows, and some of them are scarred in the sense that they're not there anymore. But the city does continue to exist and function,

and in a way that's kind of breathtaking. And a lot of people have left, but a larger number of people have not left. And so, you know, it was and is the second largest city in Ukraine. It is damaged in a way that is just not true of Kiev. You know, Kiev, you can kind of kid yourself, but for the power outages that it's not in a war zone. You know, public transportation functions. The cafe scene is awesome. There are office buildings that are office buildinging.

There is kind of normal day-to-day life that, you know, the power outages and the occasional missile attacks interrupt. But the operational pace of that stuff is relatively slow. And so you can, in the meantime, you can kind of go to a bookstore and life can be sort of normalish. Clarkive is different. I mean, the average building that you see has sustained some real damage. there's whole neighborhoods of it that has been destroyed. In the early days of the war,

the Russians actually sent troops into the city. There's a school that I visited that 20 Russian troops had holed up in. I think they'd gotten lost on their way into the city and they'd taken shelter in this school. And the Ukrainians surrounded the school, demanded that they surrendered and they didn't. And so they bombarded them until they were effectively killed in the place. But, you know, there were pitched battles in Kharkiv. And the Russians continue to hit Kharkiv on a regular basis. So, you know, I saw one site of a missile attack that was two weeks ago. You know, you could still see laundry hanging in the building, the remains of the building. And yet, one of the military guys I talked to when I asked him, you know, what do you want people to take away from this?

He said, I want people to understand that we're not leaving. We didn't leave when the Russians were in the city. We didn't leave when they've bombarded the city for four years and we're not leaving now. I think that's kind of the vibe that you get. It's this very fist in the air. We are here. we're not going anywhere, fuck you. That is a little different from the public narrative that you're hearing now.

I just like the conventional wisdom, I think, on social media and the news, like what I watch is that there is increasing sense that the Ukrainians are open to dealing at this point in a way that they weren't before, whether that be related to political issues, domestically, the corruption issues with Aslansky or the Cold Winter or, or the fact that's just been going on for so long, you know, that maybe the hardline position about, you know, we're not going to give you any territory might be modulating a little bit. That sense is out there. It's not like Zelensky said it. You know what I mean? How do you react to that?

No, that sense is absolutely right. But I think it's a little bit of a different point than I was making about Kharkiv. The Ukrainians know they do not have a play in the short term. to take back the 20% of their territory that is currently occupied by the Russian Federation. So if you say to them, what is a just and fair and reasonable outcome? They say, get the fuck out of our territory and give us back Crimea and give us back the 20,000 missing children that have been kidnapped. And by the way, pay reparations and by the way, break up the Russian Federation, right?

Like, they'll give you a long list of, but if you say, is a ceasefire going to include, you know, withdrawal of Russian forces from currently occupied territory, they'll say, of course not, you know, they know that that's not happening in the short term and that the recovery of those territories is, you know, a longer term endeavor. I think if you ask, and I haven't done this polling, but if you have, ask, what are you more concerned about the missing children or territory that was lost, I think most people will tell you they're more immediately concerned about people. And a lot of people have said to me over the years that I've been involved in this,

Americans talk about territory as though it's land. For us, it's the people living under that occupation that is the real concern. Not that the land is not a concern, of course, but a lot of people in these areas, you know, have family or have friends who are living under Russian occupation. And that is for a lot of them, the bigger, I had dinner with a guy whose grandfather is living in, you know, in Donetsk. And that's a tough situation, right? And so occupation is, there's the land issue, but there's also the human issue. That's interesting. I hadn't really thought about it that way, you know, that element.

of like, oh, right, my buddy or my grandpa lives into this occupation. And a lot of them will not leave because those are their homes and their families were, you know, forced into collectivization by Stalin, right? And there's a, there's a lot of obstinacy that people come by well and legitimately, and they don't want to be driven out of their homes. And so these are real issues for a lot of people. people. Look, Kharkiv is, I did not expect to fall in love with that city. It's, you know, it's kind of a gritty industrial town and, you know. It's like the Toledo of Ukraine.

I was going to say like imagine Pittsburgh before the Renaissance, right? And I came away sort of in awe of it. And I, you know, I was having coffee with this woman, Kate Bohuslavka, who blogs on Twitter as Kate from Kharkiv. I've seen her. And I have been kind of a fan of her blogging since the beginning of the full scale invasion.

And so I went to have coffee with her and she took me to this like very shishi cafe with, you know, you can be inside it and really have no sense that you're not in Paris

or Stockholm or Amsterdam or New York or whatever. But you look out the window and there is a bombed out building on the other side of the street from it. And she pointed at the window and said, you know, that view is why I wanted you to meet me here. And then she said it used to be a beautiful building. I think that's sort of Harkiv in a nutshell, right? It's angry.

It's fierce. It's not going anywhere. But it's also, you know, very substantially destroyed. and it really didn't do anything to deserve that. What do they think about us, how we've abandoned them? So you get a lot of different responses to that question. I mean, you know, there's a certain anger among a certain group of people. It's never directed at you as the person who's there,

but it is like, you know, we thought America stood for something. and on the other hand, there's a historic sentimental attachment to us that is, you know, real. A lot of people speak English because they watched American movies and TV shows and they, you know, all that soft power shit is real. And partly for that reason, there's a real sense of betrayal. And so the feelings are complicated. I also have to say, and no one expressed this to me, but it's very embarrassing to be there as an American right now,

both because of the way we've treated them, but also because, you know, we're here, you know, committing sepuku and carving up our own bellies, dealing with bullshit problems that aren't real, like, you know, weaponization. of the Justice Department against Donald Trump, right? And the half-time show or whatever. And they're being bombed by the Russians and, you know,

their city is being destroyed or their country is being destroyed. And they are actually under rather difficult circumstances. And it's not a perfect society. You know, they have their own corruption problems. They have their own internal politics. But they are banding together. and trying to protect this country under serious threat. And there's something embarrassing about being there.

You know, JVL would call it decadence, right? Our decadence, yeah. Our decadence, right? That we're going to fight about whether the Fulton County theft of the election in 2000. We're going to make up things to fight about. And then we're going to go talk about invading, Greenland, and they're actually being bombed. They have a name for that, which they call people like us the unbombed. And I do think Americans are the quintessential unbombed. The unbombed almost feels too

nice to us in a certain way. You know what I mean? The problem is identified by Donald Trump that animated people are mostly the figment of people's imagination. Correct. We made up problems to hate each other about, and then we tore our society apart over them. And claimed as the vice president said that we don't have social cohesion anymore. Right. Because of the imaginary pet eaters next door are ruining. Right. Up to and including shooting people.

And there's something about being in a society that's dealing with real problems. And the problems are that the Russians have invaded. Right. It's like, you know, like a 1980s movie and that they're trying to figure out how to be nice to each other in the face of real problems. And we're trying to figure out how to be cruel to each other in the face of imagined problems. And I found it very inspiring. And I also found it humiliating. The unbombed, the unsirious, the unreal.

I don't know. We need some additional suggestions in the comments. I want to do a little bit more geopolitics around this. I read this economist article about a week ago now that painted a picture for what if how Putin wins. And it was kind of an interesting scenario

because it's like different than the way I'd imagined it in my head. So I want to posit it for you and think about how people are thinking about it there. The short of it basically is that Putin holds only the territory that they've gained now. There's a ceasefire.

It's a deal. He moves in a bunch of Russians into that 20% of Ukraine arrests any dissidents living there, then maybe makes a Crimea-style move into one of the small islands off of Estonia. And it's like, we'll see if NATO comes to defense of, you know, whatever, a couple dozen people living on some Estonian island in the Baltic.

Maybe he leaves then, even, puts another Medvedev-style stooge in and re-emerges as like the leader of greater Russia. Maybe he takes over Belarus, you know, and they have some kind of, you know, Belarusian, Baltic, Ukrainian, Russian, greater Russia. And that's kind of how things look in 2030. I thought that was an interesting perspective, because it talks about kind of a way that Putin wins not in the way that we talk about it here, which is like Zelensky quits, you know. First of all, a lot of that is happening. The moving in Russians to occupied areas in Ukraine, that is happening now.

Moving out Ukrainians is also happening. And so, you know, this 200-year, 300-year effort across regimes in Russia to russify Ukraine is an ongoing thing. And remember, the idea. that you pick at the scabs of NATO countries at the same time, using the shadow fleet, using incidents that just happened to happen, right, whether it's planes crashing in Poland, right? There are these things that happen. The Finns and the Estonian seem to bear a lot of the brunt of them. Oh, and the incorporation of Belarus into the so-called Union state,

that's an ongoing thing as well. And so I don't think there's anything implausible. The ambition that you describe is exactly what he's trying to do, and he's trying to do it over, you know, Russia still occupies a lot of Georgia. It still has the Transnistria region of Moldova, you know, and so creating these little fake state things in a variety of different locations of which the Ukrainian. territories are just one. That's clearly what he's trying to do. And the question is how tolerant or how many of the Western power is going to be of it. And our position right now seems to be infinitely as long as we can blow up boats in Venezuela or off the coast of Venezuela. A well-built wardrobe is about pieces that work together and hold up over time. That's what Quince does best, premium material, softened

design in everyday staples that feel easy to wear and easy to rely on even as the weather shifts. Quince is the everyday essentials I love with quality that lasts, organic cotton sweaters, polos for every occasion, lighter jackets to keep you warm in the changing seasons. The list goes on. Quince works directly with top factories and cuts out the middleman so you're not paying for brand markup, just quality clothing. Everything is built to hold up to daily wear and still look good season after season, but they only partner with factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and production. I've been a Quince man.

You've seen some of them. Speaking of those sweaters for the cold season, you've seen that little maroon Henley sweater I've been wearing? That's hot. People like that. People are noticing that. I was turning some heads around MS now. Refresh your wardrobe with Quince.

Go to quince.com slash the bulwark for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. It's now available in Canada, too. What's up, Canada? That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash the bulwark. Free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash the bulwark. That takes us to as we can.

kind of take out our orb and do kind of worst case scenario next five years outcomes. So you also did kind of a talk about the Carney-Davo speech. I thought it might be interesting to kind of revisit that now with the benefit of whatever it's time is a flat circle in the Trump era. Is that two weeks ago? Was that two months ago? Who knows who I think it was like three or four weeks ago? Because it was before I went to Ukraine.

But at the time, you know, one of my Canadian buddies said to like, Carney's just feeding you some red meat. You as an anti-Trumper are just, you know, kind of like his base right now. And he's giving you exactly what you want to hear about how Trump is ruining the world order. And I was like, maybe there's something to that, right? Like this notion that the U.S. had fucked up so badly that the world was already having to reorient around them, kind of no matter what happens. And Canada was going to start to do that in the other Western European countries.

that idea feels right to me and also appeals to me on an emotional level. Now, like a month later, Trump has tacoed on Greenland. You know, we're going to the same cycle we've been through with him on a bunch of other stuff and foreign policy. He hasn't broken up NATO yet. You know, he didn't go to Davos to break up NATO. How does that sit with you now? Like, is this inevitable, like this sort of realignment? And was the sense in Ukraine that, like, they're acting as if it's inevitable because they've got to deal with Europe now?

Well, first of all, the Ukrainians and the Europeans are really different because the Ukrainians don't trust the Europeans either. And, you know, the Ukrainians have to get everything they can get from the Europeans who are currently their protectors. But they also know that eventually Europe alone cannot protect Ukraine. And so they have to also have the closest possible relationship with the United States, which to this day still provides them all. kinds of tactical intelligence. And remember, Trump has relaxed the Biden administration's restrictions on long-range missile strikes. So they've actually got some things out of him that are not trivial. I think the U.S.-Europe relationship, on which I'm not a particular expert, has taken a huge amount of damage. And Europe will not, for the foreseeable future, be able to

restore the closest of the relationship because we change course every four years. And how do they know that, you know, if they get a bulwark Democrat or Republican as the next president and they, rah, rah, America's back, how do they know that four years later they don't get, you know, Donald Trump Jr. Right? Or J.D. Vance. And a lot of them I think rightly think JD events is maybe worse for them. Maybe not as far as existential risk is concerned because Trump is an insane person, but just from a ideological standpoint. Right.

I mean, J.D. Van genuinely seems to hate Europe with a deep and abiding passion. They cannot rely on us. Now, Ukraine also cannot rely on us, but Ukraine also cannot really rely on Europe. Europe needs to get its own act together. and it knows it and it's very hard to do because of how hard it is to govern Europe. Ukraine needs the closest possible relationship with everybody who can help it. And that's actually a different set of problems, right? And it does need European integration, but it also needs to stay super close to the United States,

even when we're beating up on them. Look, it's an impossible situation. And the good news is they have handled it very, deftly. They've actually, you know, I don't like to praise the Trump administration for anything, and I'm not going to do it here. Thank you. This would not be the place to try. I will praise Ukrainian diplomacy in handling the Trump administration. We have had now three cycles, one in the Oval Office meeting with Zelensky, one with Putin on the tarmac in the red carpet, right, and one with the Whitkoff Peace Plan.

where Trump announces in public what he actually thinks, which is that he hates Ukraine and he thinks it should capitulate to Russia and we're there, right? And the Ukrainians go to work and they whittle away at it and whittle away at it. And two weeks later, in each case, the United States is in a not good place, but a much less crazy place. And, you know, they've been very, very effective at managing this relationship. And that's not because, you know, and that's a credit to their diplomacy under enormous pressure. How long they can put off a real rupture with the United States, nobody knows.

But they are there in Abu Dhabi having peace talks with Putin to keep the American. Americans happy. And so, you know, it's a very delicate relationship for them. And they're doing it without the, you know, Ruda ass-kissing stuff, which I have a lot of respect for. It's hard to have respect for anyone calling Trump Daddy. I think that, I think that goes beyond appropriate diplomatic management. All right, let's do the lawfare hat for a few topics. You mentioned the aforementioned Fulton County raid. Should I put on my barrister's wig for this part? Put on your barrister's wig, please. Yeah. Oh, great. We're really going to do that.

Yeah. Love that. The latest news on the Lawfare Beat, Barrister, is the affidavit supporting the raid of the Fulton County Election Office was just released a couple hours ago. I think Stephen Fowler is down there, summed it up pretty well for May. He goes, at first read, the evidence cited includes claims that were never substantiated by multiple courts and investigations and others that misunderstand how election process works. It seems to me that basically like an FBI agent filed an affidavit that was just, I guess, you know, the Winnie the Pooh and the Tuxedo version of the Sydney Pal fever dream list.

I think that's right. So I read the affidavit briefly late this afternoon and I have not gone back and compared it line by line to the record as we know it. My impression is it is basically a list of conspiracy theories that have been mostly debunked. And the question of how an FBI agent actually filed that document, like, that one's a mystery to me. I guess it's probably a friend of the director who's probably involved at some level. I'm very concerned that an FBI agent put his name to that affidavit. And I'm also very concerned that a magistrate judge, and not one who's like a Trumpist or anything, looked at that and appears not to have had a kind of what are you smoking moment. And so I'm still wondering from a magistrate's point of view, you look at this list of facts.

And even if you don't have a good bullshit detector about where they come from, you're like, well, what's the evidence that this was a crime rather than a fuck-up, which, by the way, happens all the time. You know, look, I'm glad it got unsealed. I think it will be extensively litigated. And I suspect that the more appellate review, the more judicial review it gets, the less it's going to stand up. But it's a very unfortunate example of the courts not playing the role that we have come to admire the lower courts for playing, which is really put a check on the crazy. Katie's sharing with me that this is one of those things. It's like sometimes you read the news. Is this real? A lawyer for the Gateway Pundit, which is a conspiracy rag, advised outlet that Kevin Monsia,

one of the witnesses the FBI relied on in the search warrant affidavit was not reliable. Monsia is a known fabricator. I wouldn't touch publish anything he produces. That's Sam Levine. Says the Gateway Pundit. I'm involved. I mean, why not?

I guess this is maybe one of this is like a conspiracy whack-a-mole situation. A lot of judges are rejecting them, but, you know, eventually something's going to slip through the cracks. I guess I'm mixing my metaphors there, but you get where I'm going. So, look, one of the problems with having a 900-person judiciary is that, you know, all of the children cannot be above average. And you see that judges make mistakes, by the way. I don't mean to rag on the poor magistrate here. They have nothing except the documents that are put in front of them. They don't hear from defense lawyers.

Right. And so, you know, if you were not somebody who was steeped in the conspiracy theorizing about Fulton County and an FBI agent has sworn this affidavit, I'm not sure you would necessarily know to say, this is really cray-cray. That said, you do hope that somebody would know to do that. On the people working for the government side of things, I don't know if anybody can be average. They're really starting to struggle in that part of their lawfare efforts to borrow a term from you. The prosecutor shortage is, you know, we went through this with Lindsay Halligan, like trying to find somebody to do a sham. indictment against Jim Comey. We discussed that. I think the last time you're on. Now we've got

in Minnesota, 75% of the office has quit of people working for the U.S. Attorney there. I talked to Jane Koston yesterday about how at the CFTC in Chicago, where they do most of the oversight of derivatives crime, there's only one lawyer left. And one of the people that quit told Barron's on background that if they were a different type of person, they'd start a crypto scam right now because there are no cops on the beat at all. Their lack of horses to carry out their lawfare seems to be a big problem for them at this point. It is a big problem for them. And look, it's a good thing. As a general matter, I do want everybody to have good lawyers. I don't think it is a bad thing that good lawyers are refusing to represent these guys.

You want everybody besides Pam Bondi to have a good lawyer. Exactly. And look, there are things that I do want them to have good lawyers for, like the part where the good lawyers say, you can't do that. But the litigation management of, you know, terrible positions, I'm not sorry at all that they are overwhelmed and they're, you know, they're not in a position even to comply with the court orders that they're getting on a routine basis because they're so disorganized, right? And I don't think it's a bad thing

that the malevolence is somewhat being tempered by overburdened incompetence. You know, it is shocking to watch it. I've watched this department for 30 years now. And I've never seen it be incompetent before. I've seen it screw things some things up. Sure. But I've never seen a situation in which you wonder if the lawyer who wrote the average brief has any idea what the factual record looks like, right? You watch one case or another after another in which they're being accused of factual misrepresentations. And some of these cases, it's not that they're lying to the courts. It's that they have no idea what the record is. they're not even in a position to lie.

Sometimes they're lying. And there's something very shocking about watching the government not be able to function in its basic defense of itself. The most, I think, shocking anecdote that demonstrated just how dire their situation is was that Guy Chad Mazzle, Bondi's former chief of staff, posts on X, basically saying if you're an attorney that supports the Trump agenda, DM me, and I'll get you a job as an AUSA. It's like, what? And that's insane. And there was this woman in Minnesota who goes in front of a judge, all but asks to be held in contempt. No, not all but, asks. Just hold me in contempt. I need a good night's sleep.

Because I need a decent night's sleep. But then. also says, you know, this situation sucks, this job sucks. And, you know, she's clearly at the end of her rope. And I was interested. The press played this as a flame out on a freak out on her part, rather than an accurate description of the circumstances, you know, and her being candid with a federal judge about the situation that she was in as a government lawyer. Interestingly, the judge didn't interpret it that way. The judge interpreted as, you know, this is non-you, this is on ice. And I thought that was actually a pretty sophisticated federal judge, frankly. Speaking of things that they're fucking up, because they, you know, don't have the infrastructure

to carry out all the elements of their authoritarian playbook, this story from today is tough, but I'm just going to read it. This is in blue. Bloomington, Minnesota. They arrested Rashad Johnson out of Maple Grove and a sex trafficking bust. The officer who was reporting on this said it's the most disturbing arrest that we've had here. And here's why he does the background checks for ice and homeland security. So like the guy that is reviewing the new ICE agents was also doing some sex trafficking. Yeah, I was unaware of that case.

I will say that I am aware of some other cases in which I want to be very careful of how I say this. Significant sexual abuse cases warrants could not proceed because the agents in question were deployed on other things. and these were major, you know, major abuse situations, urgent exigent situations, and say you don't have access to the people who would normally effectuate a warrant because they've been, you know, deployed on some dramatically less important, whether it's, you know, doing perimeter security for, for ice raids or, you know, fair evasion. in the District of Columbia on buses. So you're saying, just to be clear, that the law enforcement agents were not committing the crimes, but they were unable to apprehend the criminal

because they had been sent to other jurisdictions to do immigration nonsense. Yeah, I got it. The case that you're describing is worse still, but the non-availability of people because resources are being sucked up by deranged priorities is more norm than exception

at this point. I saw some pretty alarming numbers about this, the crime rate of border patrol agents as well, which I think speaks to another ongoing problem there. One other thing on the immigration, so there's a detention ruling, I think this week up from the Fifth Circuit, which covers my part of the world,

the Redneck Circuit. It's why your part of the world is so great because the Fifth Circuit has made that part of America great again. Yeah, things are going great. and Shreveport. They issued a ruling, I think the only circuit court to issue the ruling, siding with the Trump administration on the ICE detention centers. Basically, they're like, the administration can detain anyone they want indefinitely. As mentioned, the other courts have gone the other way. This is teeing up a SCOTUS showdown. And so I just haven't discussed

this one at all. There's some other, obviously, we've got tariffs and birthright citizenship and other SCOTUS showdowns, but this is another, I think, big one coming towards the court. Look, I don't think it is a bad thing to have relatively swift conflicts in the between the circuits on these things because it forces the Supreme Court to take responsibility for them rather than to sort of shadow docket at it. I don't think it matters very much what the lower courts think of this. This is a can you count to five question. And, you know, on the tariffs, nobody's sure how to count. to five. And on birthright citizenship, people are, I think, pretty sure that there aren't five votes to support the administration's view. My working assumption is that with most of the immigration law stuff, with the exception of the Alien Enemies Act, the administration is going to win a lot of this stuff. And the reason is that Congress has written these laws very expansively. They're not very well

written and so the administration will tend to in the short term get what it wants and that means that you know the fifth circuit is probably more likely than the second circuit to tell you what the law is likely to end up being and I wish that were not true but I think it probably is and I I really think that if and when sanity returns to either House of Congress, taking a look at some of these statutes is a really high priority thing to do. I agree. It's going to be tough, and we're not to give them the backbone, because I think there's going to be a lot of Democrats that say touching immigration is not worth that.

It shouldn't be a priority. And just the abuse of power and the outrages are too great for them not to try to do something. All right. We mentioned the Washington Post. You were there. You're an editorial writer there for a decade. I was there for almost 10 years. And so I guess, do you have any parting thoughts for the podcast and for your former employer? Yeah, I mean, I was in Kiev when this happened.

And I was in the weird position of suddenly realizing that lawfare now has more employees in Ukraine than the Washington Post, which was, was an odd feeling. No, I mean, it's tragic. It's a great institution, or it was a great institution, and it's been vandalized by a billionaire who, I think most of us, I was former by the time he bought it, but I think most of us who love the Washington Post, believe in the Washington Post, were very glad when when Bezos bought it, he had the confidence of Don Graham, which meant a lot to a lot of us. And he had bottomless capacity for investment in the institution. He did seem to want to build something. And for a number of years, he made smart investments and grew the place.

And there was a lot to admire about his ownership of the post. until Donald Trump came along and, you know, the second wife. Maybe the second wife. I don't know what the explanation for it is, but the turnaround has been very dramatic, and the institution will never, you know, it is in a death spiral now,

and it is heading to one or either death by death or death by becoming a, you know, a sort of skeleton, of itself. And it's very sad to watch. I grew up there professionally and I have a great deal of attachment to the place, the institution and the people there, many of whom have lost their jobs in the last week. There's some appropriate symmetry, I guess, though, that you're in Kiev, that a former Washington Post employee was in Kiev doing independent reporting for independent media at the time that they were firing the people that they had living in Ukraine and reporting

from Ukraine and telling them good luck getting home. Yes. First of all, the idea that you would leave somebody stranded in that, I mean, that's just abominable. But secondly, there was a sense of, wow, we're both here under these weird circumstances. I'm a former Washington. Posty, who's built an independent organization because I don't want to be answerable to people like Jeff Bezos and because I want to do the work that Lawfare does. And a lot of people told me when I left the post that somebody even said to me, it's like leaving, being an editorial writer at the Washington Post is like quitting when you're playing center field for the Yankees. And I was like, yeah, but I don't want to do it anymore.

And now 15 years later or 18 years later, the post has fallen apart and, you know, I'm still doing what I do. So, you know, there is something weird and ironic about that, that these institutions that seem very permanent are permanent until they're not. You shared some really moving images from Ukraine. And so we'll put the links to that in the show notes. And as aforementioned, the effort to get folks batteries there. Appreciate that, man. It's good to see you with the barrister hat and keep us posted, all right? We'll do.

Everybody else, we will be back here tomorrow with another one of your faves. We're playing the hits this week. So we'll see you all then. Peace. The Borg podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brow.