04 April 23
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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
Greene, in Manhattan to protest Donald J. Trump’s arraignment, was photographed eating the Judaic sausage in Times Square while en route to having her picture taken with Elmo.
After images of Greene seemingly enjoying the controversial beef product ricocheted across social media, the Georgia congresswoman took to Twitter to control the damage.
“I take no responsibility for any meat I ingested while under the influence of the Rothschild banking family’s mind-control beams,” she tweeted.
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Jacob Chansley, also known as the 'QAnon Shaman,' screams 'Freedom' inside the U.S. Senate chamber after the Capitol was breached by a mob during a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
Trump has already been indicted once. More indictments could be coming.
Nor is Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation into Trump, which led to this indictment, the only such investigation that could lead to criminal charges against the former president. There are three other known investigations into Trump.
Two are federal; a federal special prosecutor, Jack Smith, took over both last November.
The first federal probe involves an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida compound, which revealed that the former president kept classified documents — including, according to the Washington Post, ones “relating to nuclear weapons.”
There are also some outward signs that this federal investigation into Trump is gaining steam. In a dramatic development last month, one of Trump’s own lawyers, Evan Corcoran, testified before a grand jury about his conversations with Trump.
The second probe, meanwhile, involves what Attorney General Merrick Garland described as “the investigation into whether any person or entity unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election, or with the certification of the Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021.”
Then there’s a fourth criminal probe, in Georgia, investigating whether Trump illegally tried to change the result of the 2020 election. Criminal charges against Trump could potentially arise out of a post-election call with Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump told the state’s top election official that he wanted “to find 11,780 votes.” (Biden defeated Trump in Georgia by 11,779 votes.)
We do not yet know if any of these investigations will end in Trump being convicted of a crime. In all but one of them, we don’t even know if Trump will be formally charged with violating a criminal statute. And in the one investigation where Trump has been charged — Bragg’s New York-based investigation — there is some legal uncertainty about whether the felony statute Trump was indicted under actually reaches Trump’s alleged actions.
When all these investigations are complete and all the potential charges against Trump are resolved, in other words, it is still possible that he will never be convicted of a crime.
Nevertheless, Trump is already the first former US president ever to be indicted. And many of the key facts that could lead to other indictments, including the fact that he kept classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and the fact that he tried repeatedly to overturn Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, are not reasonably in doubt.
The New York indictment of Donald Trump
The Manhattan DA has been investigating financial fraud at the Trump Organization for several years. Bragg’s office has already secured a couple of convictions against Trump’s primary business and one of his close business associates.
Last August, former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to allegations that he did not pay taxes on $1.7 million in compensation — including an apartment, two cars, and private school tuition for family members. He also agreed to testify against the Trump Organization, and this allowed prosecutors to convict the Trump Organization of 17 counts of tax fraud and related financial crimes arising from the payments to Weisselberg.
But Weisselberg did not agree to testify against Trump, and the actual charges against the former president arise out of a separate set of shady transactions: Trump’s alleged $130,000 in payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels, which were made to cover up an alleged sexual encounter between Trump and Daniels in 2006 (Trump denies that he had sex with Daniels).
Notably, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance crimes arising out of these hush money payments to Daniels in 2018.
The specific criminal charges against Trump are not yet known, but he’s reportedly been charged with more than 30 counts of business fraud. New York law typically does not make it a crime to pay a former sexual partner to remain silent about an affair. But it is a crime to falsify business records in New York “with the intent to defraud.”
So, if Bragg can prove that Trump mischaracterized his payments to Daniels in the Trump Organization’s own documents in order to cover up those payments, that could potentially allow Trump to be convicted.
There is, however, a catch. Ordinarily, falsifying business records is only a misdemeanor under New York law — meaning that it is a minor crime that is only punishable by up to a year in prison — and that matters because the statute of limitations for misdemeanors is only two years in New York state. So, if Trump is only charged with a misdemeanor, Bragg would have to prove that Trump tried to cover up the payments to Daniels within the last two years — which is unlikely because those payments have been public since at least 2018.
That said, it is possible to charge a defendant accused of falsifying business records with a felony, and the statute of limitations for this more serious felony is five years. To charge Trump with a felony, however, Bragg also has to prove that Trump falsified business records with the “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”
One possibility is that Bragg could try to link Trump to the federal campaign finance crime Cohen pleaded guilty to in 2018. But it is far from clear that New York state prosecutors may charge Trump with a felony because he tried to cover up a federal, as opposed to a state, crime.
As Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office, wrote in a recent book, the felony statute is “ambiguous” — though it refers to “another crime,” it does not say whether this crime may be a federal criminal act or only an act that violates New York’s criminal law. Worse, Pomerantz writes, “no appellate court in New York has ever upheld (or rejected) this interpretation of the law.”
Alternatively, Bragg could attempt to link Trump to a second violation of New York’s criminal law, but it’s unclear what that second violation might be.
The state of the investigation into Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election
The Justice Department’s larger investigation into the January 6 attacks has been going on since they happened, focusing first on the people who stormed the Capitol. Initially, there wasn’t a consensus in the political world about whether Trump had committed crimes with his web of lies about the election. So an investigation into him does not appear to have begun immediately.
We now know that a team of prosecutors began more intensely scrutinizing Trump and his associates in the fall of 2021. About a year ago, this team was “given the green light by the Justice Department to take a case all the way up to Trump, if the evidence leads them there,” according to a recent CNN article.
The probe proceeded quietly at first. In January 2022, the Washington Post reported that “so far the department does not appear to be directly investigating” Trump. But just a week and a half after that article, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco confirmed an investigation into one aspect of Trump’s scheme: fake electors. This was Trump allies’ effort to name Trump supporters as electors in key swing states Biden won, and to have their purported electoral votes submitted to Congress and Vice President Mike Pence and effectively dispute the actual electors’ votes.
“Our prosecutors are looking at those, and I can’t say anything more on ongoing investigations,” Monaco said.
By May, the investigation had subpoenaed many close Trump aides for documents and was asking specifically for info about lawyers who had tried to help him overturn the election. In June, the home of Jeffrey Clark — the official Trump tried to put in charge of the DOJ so he could enlist the department in declaring the election results fraudulent — was searched by federal agents. The DOJ’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, is involved in the investigation of Clark since he was a DOJ employee at the time. Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), who put Trump in touch with Clark, is also a key subject of this investigation.
By late July, the Washington Post reported prosecutors were asking “hours of detailed questions” about Trump’s actions specifically, on topics such as the extent of his involvement with the fake elector push and his effort to pressure Pence to throw out state electoral votes. Then, in September, investigators issued at least 40 subpoenas in a week, this time focusing more on Trump’s political and fundraising operations. More recently, new subpoenas have gone out to state officials Trump tried to pressure.
A growing number of Trump aides have gone in to testify before one of several active Washington, DC, grand juries in recent months. The former president filed a secret suit to try to block testimony of aides like former White House counsel’s office lawyers Pat Cipollone and Pat Philbin, citing privilege concerns, but he lost that suit, and they testified in December.
The new battles are over whether former White House aides like Mark Meadows — and Vice President Mike Pence — will have to testify, or whether they can cite executive privilege. District judges have already rejected their privilege claims, but they may appeal.
Yet though the election investigation certainly seems quite sprawling and serious, we still lack visibility into a few important questions.
First, how strong is the evidence against Trump personally? Have they “flipped” members of his inner circle who can testify that he knowingly committed corrupt activity — or not? Will he be able to get out of charges by claiming (some of) his lawyers advised him everything he was doing was legally permissible?
Second, what is the DOJ thinking about the legal issues at the heart of the case? The House January 6 committee argued that Trump broke four laws in his attempt to stay in power: obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make a false statement, and assisting an insurrection. And a federal judge, David Carter, already ruled last year that evidence suggests Trump committed some of these crimes.
Still, though DOJ investigators are clearly taking their investigation very seriously, we don’t know whether they agree with Judge Carter’s analysis of the law or whether they are even entirely sure what they think about it yet. One of Trump’s arguments in defense will likely be that he was engaging in politicking and political speech, not plotting a criminal conspiracy. If he is indicted, that argument would surely reach the Supreme Court at some point.
This is all fairly novel territory, and it’s hard to point to a case quite like it. The topic is enormously important, but because Trump’s actions were so unprecedented, there’s much less of a road map on what the special counsel’s path forward should be.
The state of the classified documents investigation
The classified documents case before the special counsel seems simpler from both a legal and evidentiary perspective than the election case, but it has its own potential problems.
When the FBI went to Mar-a-Lago in search of classified documents in August 2022, the political world was rife with speculation about what could have justified such an extraordinary action and what Trump might have been up to. Was he selling classified material to the highest bidder? Was he trying to blackmail the “deep state”? These theories were never backed by evidence, but a Washington Post report that agents were looking for “nuclear documents” suggested this was monumental stuff indeed.
Yet subsequent reports suggested that DOJ prosecutors and FBI agents working on it were not always in full agreement about the strength of the case. According to a Washington Post report in December, the FBI initially wasn’t sure it wanted to take up the case at all. The National Archives had asked them to get involved because they had found classified material in boxes belatedly returned to them by Trump, and they thought more material was missing. Even after Trump appeared to defy a grand jury subpoena to return documents, some FBI agents working on the case “weren’t certain” they had enough probable cause for a search, per the Post.
The search took place in August, and prosecutors claim to have found dozens of classified documents, but exactly what they found remains mysterious. The Post reported some documents had “highly sensitive intelligence regarding Iran and China,” including a description of Iran’s missile programs. The government has expressed concern that the information could jeopardize human intelligence sources. But it is difficult to evaluate those claims because, well, the information is classified.
Meanwhile, the DOJ-FBI divide reportedly persisted. Bloomberg News reported in October that though some DOJ prosecutors thought there was enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice because he defied the subpoena, some “internal critics,” including in the FBI, are questioning why Trump would be charged when Hillary Clinton wasn’t in her own classified information investigation. (Clinton had some classified information in email chains sent to her personal email account that she had used for work; Trump had paper documents in boxes at Mar-a-Lago.)
Furthermore, yet another Washington Post story suggests that the more ominous and speculative theories about Trump’s motives in keeping classified documents weren’t founded, in investigators’ eyes. They’ve come to believe, instead, that his motive was “largely his ego and a desire to hold on to the materials as trophies or mementos.” That would not get him off the hook for violating classified information law, but it’s certainly less of a clear-cut threat to national security than, say, the attempted selling of documents would be.
Yet Trump is also potentially vulnerable to charges of obstruction and making false statements to the government.
That’s where his attorney, Corcoran, comes in. Corcoran told the government, in June 2022, that Trump had turned over all the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. But the FBI search two months later revealed that was not true. Investigators reportedly believe that Trump lied to Corcoran, and that’s why they were so interested in getting Corcoran’s testimony.
Special counsel Smith may view these as the most straightforward charges against Trump. And though any charging recommendation Smith makes will go up to Attorney General Merrick Garland for approval, his opinion will carry great weight in determining whether Trump ends up indicted on these fronts this year.
The Georgia investigation into Trump’s attempts to overthrow the 2020 election
In early January 2022, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s office asked a Georgia court to convene a special grand jury “for the purpose of investigating the facts and circumstances relating directly or indirectly to possible attempts to disrupt the lawful administration of the 2020 elections in the State of Georgia.”
This investigation includes both Trump’s “find 11,780 votes” phone call and the Trump campaign’s attempt to create a slate of fake members of the Electoral College who would fraudulently tell Congress that the state’s electoral votes were cast for Trump.
The special grand jury, whose investigation is now complete, heard testimony from several very high-profile Trump allies, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and US Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
While Willis has yet to file charges against Trump or any members of his inner circle, and while the full grand jury report remains sealed, the forewoman of this special grand jury told the New York Times that the report recommends multiple indictments.
The forewoman also said that “it’s not a short list.”
It remains to be seen whether Willis files any charges against Trump. For the moment, Trump’s lawyers are trying to convince an Atlanta court to suppress the grand jury report and to disqualify Willis from the case. But there are a few Georgia criminal statutes that could potentially reach Trump’s conduct after the 2020 election.
Georgia laws make it a crime to willfully tamper with certain aspects of an election, to solicit another person to do so, or to engage in “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.”
So what should we take away from all of this?
The purpose of a criminal investigation, and ultimately of a prosecution, is to convince a jury to convict a defendant after a full criminal trial has taken place. It is not to provide the media or the public with regular updates about what law enforcement knows about potential suspects.
Especially within the context of federal investigations, these norms exist to protect the investigation — if a suspect learns too much about what information law enforcement is seeking, they could destroy evidence or tamper with witnesses — and to protect potential suspects. When someone is formally charged with a crime, they have an opportunity to vindicate themselves at trial. If they are merely the subject of accusations tossed off by government officials, they have no real way to protect or rehabilitate their reputations.
For these reasons, anyone eager to see how the other investigations into Trump will end must have patience.
Even now that Trump is indicted in Bragg’s investigation, and even if a federal indictment does happen, this will not be the end of the story — far from it. A trial or trials would follow, as would many legal challenges from Trump’s team (some perhaps before sympathetic judges). Trump likely can’t be stopped from continuing his 2024 presidential run except by voters, but despite talk of his recent political woes, he continues to lead almost every poll of a multi-candidate GOP field.
There could be many more twists and turns ahead.
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Three lawmakers were accused of breaking House procedure when they took to the floor's podium to lead balcony protesters in chants for gun reform last week. (photo: Cheney Orr/Reuters)
Three lawmakers were accused of breaking House procedure when they took to the floor’s podium to lead balcony protesters in chants for gun reform last week.
Rep. Justin Jones (D-Nashville), Rep. Gloria Johnson (D-Knoxville), and Rep. Justin Pearson (D-Memphis) took to the podium on the House floor without being recognized to speak during Thursday morning’s session, according to the Nashville Tennessean. As protesters—a fraction of the hundreds who’d gathered outside for the “Protect Our Kids” rally—filled the balcony, the trio led the crowd in chanting for gun reform.
Johnson, Pearson, and Jones were admonished by House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville) after he called for a 30-minute recess. House Minority Leader Karen Camper chastised Pearson and Jones, who’d carried a megaphone with him to the podium, for the disruption. She later reversed course, tweeting that the incident had been “#GoodTrouble.”
No arrests were made on the day, nor was any damage done to the Capitol, according to the Tennessee Highway Patrol. The protest was organized in the aftermath of a Nashville school shooting that left six people dead, including three 9-year-old children.
House Republican leaders declined to immediately reprimand the three Democrats, but have since introduced resolutions to expel the three Democrats from the chamber, according to The Tennessean.
State Rep. Sam Whitson, a Republican, was quick to characterize the incident as a “stunt,” calling for the House Democratic Caucus to dole out punishments. He stopped short of calling for their expulsion, however.
“I believe expulsion will make them martyrs and they will be re-elected or reappointed immediately, so I think the Democratic leadership and caucus should be held responsible for this incident, and if not then we will hold the Democratic Caucus responsible for tolerating such conduct,” he said, according to the Tennessee Lookout.
In an interview with a local radio station after the protest, Sexton likened the incident to an “insurrection.” His office clarified over the weekend that his remark had been directed at Jones, Johnson, and Pearson, not the protesters.
“Their actions are and will always be unacceptable, and they break several rules of decorum and procedure on the House floor,” Sexton tweeted in explanation. “Their actions and beliefs that they could be arrested on the House floor were an effort, unfortunately, to make themselves the victims.”
Earlier on Monday, it was reported that the three lawmakers had had their identification badges deactivated, restricting their access to the Tennessee Legislature and the members’ parking garage. All three still had access to their own offices and legislative staff on Monday night.
“No one told me that my garage pass was cut off. No one told me that my badge to the building was cut off,” Johnson told the Tennessean, adding that she’d been unable to retrieve her mobility scooter over the weekend.
Johnson and Jones were also stripped of their committee assignments, a retributive move first reported on Monday by Knox News. (Pearson was just seated and did not yet serve on any committees.)
Hours later, House Republicans filed resolutions to expel the trio, claiming they “did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives through their individual and collective actions.” The resolutions were introduced during a chaotic evening session in the House, with cell phone footage shot by Jones showing protesters in the balcony screaming, “Fascists!”
A vote was not immediately held on the matter, but the GOP holds a supermajority in the Tennessee Legislature, and is expected to be able to push the motions through.
Standing outside the chamber minutes before, Jones had told the Tennessean that a bipartisan expulsion vote would be “unprecedented.”
Only two sitting members have been expelled from the Tennessee House since the Civil War, most recently in 2016, when former Rep. Jeremy Durham (R-Franklin) was pushed out 70-2 after it was found he’d sexually harassed nearly two dozen women during his time in office.
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Abortion legislation needs to move through house before gaining DeSantis's likely signature while gun-carry law enacted today. (photo: John Raoux/AP)
Abortion legislation needs to move through house before gaining DeSantis’s likely signature while gun-carry law enacted today
The latest proposal to restrict reproductive rights must still be approved by the house in the state legislature before it reaches the governor’s desk. Florida currently prohibits abortions after 15 weeks.
A six-week ban would more closely align Florida with the abortion restrictions of other Republican-controlled states and give DeSantis a political win on an issue important with GOP primary voters ahead of his potential White House run.
The bill would have larger implications for abortion access throughout the south, as the nearby states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi prohibit the procedure at all stages of pregnancy and Georgia bans it after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, which is around six weeks.
Meanwhile, the new weapons law will allow anyone who can legally own a gun in Florida to carry one without a permit. It means training and a background check will not be needed for people to carry concealed guns in public. The state now has nearly 3 million permit holders.
The bill signing came five years after then governor Rick Scott, also a Republican, signed a bill creating gun restrictions after 17 students and faculty were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland in 2018.
On the abortion restriction, Erin Grall, a Republican state senator who sponsored the bill, said: “Bodily autonomy should not give a person the permission to kill an innocent human being. We live in a time where the consequences of our actions are an afterthought and convenience has been substitution for responsibility, and this is unacceptable when it comes to the protection of the most vulnerable.”
The proposal allows exceptions to save the life of the woman and exceptions in the case of pregnancy caused by rape or incest until 15 weeks of pregnancy. In those cases, a woman would have to provide documentation such as a medical record, restraining order or police report. DeSantis has called the rape and incest provisions sensible.
It would require that the drugs used in medication-induced abortions – which make up the majority of those provided nationally – could be dispensed only in person by a physician.
The new bill would only take effect if the state’s current 15-week ban is upheld in an ongoing legal challenge that is before the state supreme court.
Democratic state senator Lauren Book urged women to contact her office directly, saying on the senate floor: “Please don’t take matters into your own hands. Do not put your safety at risk. No back-alley abortions. There are people and funds that will help you. No matter where you live, no matter how desperate of a situation you are in, no matter how helpless it may seem. I promise, you are not alone. Call my office,” Book said.
Protesters opposing the abortion ban made their voices heard during the legislative debate and some were kicked out of the state capitol.
Kat Duesterhaus, leader of the activist group Bans Off Miami and a communications director for the National Organization for Women, shouted her opposition in the chamber and referred to the US supreme court’s shredding of federal abortion rights last June, when it decided the Dobbs case which included overturning Roe v Wade.
“Maternal mortality rates are three times higher in states that banned abortion post-Dobbs,” Duesterhouse shouted before being escorted out.
The bill has every chance of reaching DeSantis’s desk.
And as he signed the gun rights bill, later on Monday, Democrats and gun safety advocates, pointing to mass shootings in Florida like the massacre at the 2016 Pulse nightclub in Orlando and the Parkland shooting, said the new law will only make the state more dangerous. It came just days after three children and three adult staff were gunned down at an elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee.
The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, issued a statement on the new gun law, saying, in part: “It is shameful that so soon after another tragic school shooting, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a permitless concealed carry bill … This is the opposite of commonsense gun safety … President Biden has been clear: too many lives are being ripped apart by gun violence. The president continues to call on Congress to ban assault weapons.”
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A '90 years of service' poster hangs on the side of Planned Parenthood after the United States Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v Wade, in St. Louis, Missouri, June 24, 2022. (photo: Lawrence Bryant/Reuters)
Planned Parenthood said the law, which would eliminate the licensing process for abortion clinics and thus effectively make it impossible to get an abortion anywhere but in a hospital, violated the state constitution's rights to privacy and bodily integrity, in a lawsuit filed in the Third Judicial District Court in Salt Lake City.
The case is before Judge Andrew Stone, who last year issued a preliminary order preventing the state from enforcing an earlier abortion ban while he hears a legal challenge by Planned Parenthood. The judge said at a hearing in that separate case that it was prudent to pause a "seismic change in women's health treatment" until the lawsuit, which remains pending, is finally decided.
Planned Parenthood argued that Stone should block the newer law for the same reason, saying it would ban 95% of abortions in the state if allowed to take effect on May 3.
"As promised, Planned Parenthood Association of Utah is fighting back and doing everything in our power to make sure that Utahns can get the care they need to stay healthy," Sarah Stoez, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, said in a statement.
The office of Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, who signed the law last month, declined to comment.
The law blocked last year was a so-called trigger ban set to take effect in the event that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion established in its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which it did last June.
The law banned nearly all abortions, with exceptions for risk of death or permanent injury to the mother and for severe fetal abnormalities. It also included an exception in cases of rape or incest, but only if reported to the police.
For now, abortion remains legal up to 18 weeks of pregnancy in Utah.
Twelve of the 50 U.S. states now ban abortion outright while many others prohibit it after a certain length of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.
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Military personnel prepare to raise Finland's flag during a ceremony Tuesday at NATO headquarters in Brussels. (photo: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP)
Finnish membership will double NATO’s land border with Russia, adding more than 800 miles. It will also bolster the alliance’s presence around the Baltic Sea and enhance its position in the Arctic.
To justify his unprovoked attack on Ukraine, Putin cited the possibility of NATO expansion. Now, his war has brought a bigger, stronger NATO to his door.
“I am tempted to say, maybe this is the one thing that we can thank Mr. Putin for,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Brussels on Tuesday.
Russia’s invasion has caused “many countries to believe that they have to do more, to look out for their own defense and to make sure they can deter possible Russian aggression going forward,” he said.
Russia’s response on Tuesday was muted.
“We will be watching closely what is going on in Finland, how the NATO alliance will use Finnish territory in terms of deploying weapons, systems and infrastructure there, which will be close to our borders and therefore threaten us,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in his daily briefing to journalists. “Depending on this, measures will be taken.”
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov added his own condemnation of the development on state television. “Perhaps I can describe the current condition of our relations by one word: a wreck,” he said. “Relations are ruined, and the United States is responsible for that.”
NATO officials and diplomats downplayed the threat of significant Russian retaliation, noting Moscow’s cautious response to Finland’s bid, as well as the fact that its forces are tied up in Ukraine. Experts say the addition of Finland, which like Sweden punches above its weight in terms of military might, represents an enhancement of overall NATO security, despite the alliance’s responsibility to defend the new member if required.
Finland’s Parliament on Tuesday reported that its public-facing website had been hit by a denial-of-service attack, but it was not immediately clear who was behind it or whether it was connected to the NATO news.
Finland’s membership became official on Tuesday with a transfer of papers at NATO’s Brussels headquarters. Turkey — the last country to ratify Finland’s membership — handed its documents to Blinken, as the United States is the depository of NATO’s 1949 treaty. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg then invited Finland to do the same, concluding the accession process.
At a ceremony outside, the Finnish flag was raised. “From today, 31 flags will fly together as a symbol of our unity and solidarity,” Stoltenberg said moments before. “Joining NATO is good for Finland, good for Nordic security and good for NATO as a whole.”
But the fact that Sweden’s flag did not go up alongside Finland’s spoke to the challenge of keeping NATO allies united, even in the face of Russia’s threats.
Finland and Sweden applied for membership on the same day last spring. Putin’s aggression in Ukraine convinced both countries of the need to abandon their stance of military nonalignment. And they assessed that joining NATO in tandem, as quickly as possible, would be the best way to shield themselves from Russian retaliation.
But membership applications must be approved by all existing NATO countries. And Turkey positioned itself as a spoiler, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan using the process to extract concessions and score domestic political points. Although he ultimately came around on Finland, he has continued to hold out on Sweden, citing Stockholm’s refusal to extradite those he calls “terrorists” affiliated with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.
Hungary is stalling, too. Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesman for the Hungarian government, laid out a list of grievances last week against Stockholm, accusing its representatives of “using their political influence to harm Hungarian interests” and lambasting the country’s “crumbling throne of moral superiority.” It is not clear whether Hungary has specific demands.
NATO officials and diplomats express confidence that both member states will eventually back down. But it is not clear how soon that might happen. Few believe there will be movement before Turkish elections next month.
There is concern across the alliance that Turkey and Hungary have been willing to hand a symbolic victory to Russia — and that the rest of NATO has not been able to stop them.
“The risk is that this brings a wedge into NATO,” said Anna Wieslander, director for Northern Europe at the Atlantic Council. “Allies need to pay more attention, collectively, to this process.”
Previewing Finland’s accession on Monday, Stoltenberg stressed: “We should not leave the impression … that Sweden is left alone.” He noted that some NATO allies have already offered bilateral security assurances to Stockholm, and he suggested that full membership for Finland will help keep neighboring Sweden safe, too.
Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe, said the delay was not ideal but would indeed be temporary. “Turkey is probably close to overplaying their hand, but they will squeeze as much out of it as they can,” he said.
“Nobody should be worried about NATO,” he added. “There’s a reason there is a queue to join. Nobody is knocking on the Kremlin’s door saying, ‘Hey, let us back in.’”
In the years since Finnish soldiers on skis helped fight off Soviet invaders, the country has aligned itself with Europe, joining the European Union and becoming a close NATO partner, while still trying to engage Russia.
But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine prompted a surge of support in Finland not only for sanctions on Russia but also for becoming part of NATO and its mutual defense pact.
Although an election in Finland over the weekend resulted in the ousting of Prime Minister Sanna Marin, the country’s stance on NATO and Ukraine is not expected to change.
Blinken said Tuesday: “Finland has a highly capable military and has been an active participant in NATO-led operations; it also shares our values and strong democratic institutions. We are confident Finland’s membership will strengthen our collective defense and enhance our ability to respond to security challenges in the Euro-Atlantic area.”
He added that “Sweden is also a strong and capable partner that is ready to join NATO,” and he urged Turkey and Hungary to ratify Sweden’s membership “without delay.”
Blinken is in Brussels for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers that includes Ukraine’s Dmytro Kuleba.
Speaking ahead of the talks, Kuleba urged his country’s supporters to transfer promised weaponry as quickly as possible. “I came here to NATO to speed up deliveries of what has already been pledged to Ukraine, primarily artillery ammunition, infantry armored vehicles, personnel armored carriers, everything that Ukraine needs for a successful counteroffensive,” he said.
Kuleba also referenced Ukraine’s goal of joining NATO, which remains a distant prospect. “Finland’s accession is a clear message that the time to revise all strategies and old perceptions has come,” he said. “There is no better solution to ensuring Euro-Atlantic security as a whole than the eventual membership of Ukraine in NATO.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky congratulated Finland, making reference to his country’s desire to join NATO and a summit of alliance leaders that will be held in the Lithuanian capital in July.
“Amid Russian aggression, the alliance became the only effective guarantee of security in the region,” he said in a message on Telegram. “We expect that the Vilnius #NATOSummit will bring Ukraine closer to our Euro-Atlantic goal.”
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William Spotted Eagle, a member of the Blackfeet Nation in Billings, Montana, rested after shooting his first bison in Beattie Gulch at the edge of Yellowstone National Park last month. (photo: Michael Hanson/The New York Times)
A months-long event, just outside the park, was intended to keep the animals from spreading a disease to livestock. But its scope and other removal measures affecting hundreds more have generated opposition.
Many were stopped from migrating even farther.
For four months, state and federal officials have sanctioned a hunt of the shaggy, humped animals that delight millions of tourists and are a centerpiece of Native American culture and history.
Officials said they had no choice but to approve the lengthy culling of the roughly 6,000-member herd as the animals instinctually cross the park boundary onto other public land primarily to the north in Montana’s Paradise Valley, but also west of the park. It is part of a strategy to prevent them from getting near livestock, because some 60 percent of the bison herd carries a disease, brucellosis, that could infect cattle and cause cows to abort their calves.
But in the last several weeks, the scope of the hunt, conducted mainly by members of eight Indigenous tribes, along with other park control measures, has generated more criticism than previous hunts. As the culling winds down, the record-breaking number of bison removed from Yellowstone’s herd has climbed to more than 1,530 — including hundreds of pregnant females that would have soon been giving birth. Hundreds more were sent out of the park — some to slaughterhouses and about 285 to a quarantine site where they will be held to determine if they are disease-free. The healthy ones will be sent to homes on Native American lands elsewhere.
Yet another estimated 800 have been captured and held to protect them from the hunt.
Government officials and conservation groups have wrestled with ways to manage the annual migration for decades.
“It’s probably the single-most challenging wildlife issue in Yellowstone,” Cam Sholly, the park superintendent, said in an interview. “The bison is the only species we constrain to a boundary.”
It’s a complex management scenario. Once the bison cross an invisible national park boundary and wander into Montana to the north and west on national forest land, they become the responsibility of the state.
Under historic treaties bestowing the rights to take buffalo, members of the Nez Perce, Blackfeet, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation, Northern Arapaho, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the Crow and Shoshone-Bannock Tribes traveled to the region and harvested nearly 1,100 bison.
“It’s a very cultural and spiritual endeavor and brings our families together,” said Jeremy Red Star Wolf, of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. “And it gives us an opportunity to talk about who we are and where we come from.”
About 90 were shipped to slaughter facilities, and 75 were killed by other hunters.
“We don’t want to see this many bison taken out of the population in normal years,” Mr. Sholly said. “But we have had three years of very light migration out of the park. This is one of the first major migrations out of the park for a considerable amount of time.”
Recent studies indicate that the population should not be reduced to fewer than 3,500, Mr. Sholly said, to ensure genetic diversity. With a new calf crop this spring, the population should be about 5,000, he estimated.
Some have questioned whether killing so many animals disrupts the herds’ social structure. Mr. Sholly conceded the point, but said hunting was less invasive. “When shipping to slaughter occurred in the past, a lot of times you are taking an entire family,” he said. “The hunting is more sporadic and takes out individuals, not necessarily a whole family unit.”
The park is home to the wildest bison population in the contiguous United States, where there are virtually no fences, and where it is subject to myriad forces of nature, from weather to grizzlies and wolves. An adult bull bison can weigh up to 2,000 pounds, and cows weigh up to 1,000 pounds. Females and calves gather in herds, while bulls are usually solitary.
Yellowstone officials have also been able to diminish the practice of sending bison to slaughterhouses by expanding the hunting and increasing the numbers now given to tribes to enlarge their herds or create new ones.
Still, some critics of the hunt note that there has never been an outbreak of brucellosis infection among Montana’s roughly two million cattle that could be traced to Yellowstone bison. Bradley De Groot, the brucellosis program veterinarian for the state’s livestock department, credited constant monitoring and interventions.
The wildlife in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem are the only known U.S. reservoir of the disease, according to the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
If cattle were to become infected with the highly contagious Brucella abortus bacterium, it would result in a lockdown of the animals. (The disease localizes in reproductive organs and is passed primarily through fetal tissue after birth.) “For livestock operations that are quarantined, the only place they can sell sexually intact animals is straight to slaughter,” Mr. De Groot said. “That puts a dramatic impact on their ability to continue to generate revenue.”
Brucellosis bacteria can spread from animals to people, primarily through raw dairy products, but transmission can also be airborne. In humans, a brucellosis infection can cause undulant fever and fatigue. It can be treated with antibiotics, but may recur or become a chronic illness.
U.S. officials have rejected inoculations against brucellosis for park bison because they say existing vaccines lack efficacy and are hard to distribute. Elk in the region also are infected, and could reinfect any immunized bison. Cattle are immunized against brucellosis.
In the future, Mr. Sholly said, any preventive measures against brucellosis should also take elk into account.
“It’s hard to claim bison are presenting an imminent threat to livestock while thousands of brucellosis-infected elk are literally side-by-side with livestock in the Paradise Valley and there is no strategy to manage that interface,” Mr. Sholly said.
The disparity is partly because bison have a much higher rate of infection, Mr. De Groot said. Bison and cattle also graze in similar places, he said, “and the potential for interaction sufficient to transmit brucellosis from bison to cattle is much higher.”
Deer, moose and other species can also harbor brucellosis, but are less of a primary source of contagion.
The hunt by Indigenous tribes is, in part, an effort to restore their ruptured relationship with the bison. At least 30 million once grazed across the West, and for thousands of years they were a vital source of food; their hides were used for shelter and clothing; and their vast roaming was a symbol of freedom. They were slaughtered in massive numbers in the late 19th century to force tribes onto reservations and for profit. Some experts say climate changes and disease brought by cattle contributed to the bison’s decline.
The forced extinction reduced the once seemingly limitless herds to a handful, including some two dozen here at Yellowstone. Today’s herds are descended from the remnant population.
Beginning late last year, hundreds of Indigenous hunters from the Northwest United States have flocked to the boundaries of Yellowstone, especially to a small area called Beattie Gulch, adjacent to the park’s northern border.
Some hunters have traveled with their families to harvest buffalo. Kola Shippentower-Thompson, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in eastern Oregon, hunted with her husband, Tommy Thompson, who is the Umatilla tribal game warden, and her cousin, Dion Denny.
Ms. Shippentower-Thompson said she had shot 13 bison since December, including a big bull last month, her first. After it fell to the snow, she and her husband gutted it, and she took a ceremonial bite of the old bull’s heart.
“That is a sign of respect,” she explained. “Everything we carry is within our heart. A big bull like that has made it through all the different seasons and territorial fights with other bulls, and you are taking on its spirit and the different teachings it has within it.”
But while these last few months have allowed hunters to connect to their heritage, the enormity of the culling is creating more controversy than in previous years. Critics, including some Native Americans, decried the park bison’s limited area of migration, saying they became trapped in a very small area, had little fear of people and were not given a fair chase afforded other hunted animals.
“The killing field is across the street from my driveway entrance,” said Bonnie Lynn, the founder of Yellowstone Voices, which campaigns against the hunt. The area is crowded with hunters, who have taken the bison meat and left the waste behind, with internal organs and hundreds of skeletons scattered about, she said.
“We have wolves coming to the gut piles, coyotes coming to the gut piles, mountain lions in the area, and we have bears coming out of hibernation to the gut piles,” she said. “It’s crazyville.”
Others pointed to the dangers posed by the limited area of the hunt, citing the wounding of Jackson Wak Wak, a member of the Nez Perce tribe, who was shot in the back by a ricocheting bullet.
Billboards sponsored by two environmental groups, Roam Free Nation and Alliance for the Wild Rockies, showcase concerns, with one featuring a photo of a herd of bison and a hunter, and the headline: “There is no hunt. It’s a slaughter.”
Another organization, the Buffalo Field Campaign, turned out this year to protest the ban on bison migration out of the park onto federal land in Montana. “They are killing one-quarter of the herd,” said Mike Mease, a founder of the organization. “That is insanity.”
Mr. Mease acknowledged the importance of the tribal hunt, but he criticized what he said was a powerful commercial influence driving the extent of the hunt.
“They wipe out way too many buffalo,” he said. “No other wildlife is treated this way. This is all directed by the Montana livestock industry.”
To Jeremy Red Star Wolf, of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the hunt is not only culturally meaningful but also a reliable food source. His family killed five bison, providing meat for other families.
“We would certainly love to hunt them out on the natural landscape that once existed, but that natural landscape doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “Instead of being trapped and sent to slaughter, let us practice our treaty rights and provide bison, which has a very storied history within our tribe.”
Yellowstone’s bison face other dangers as they roam outside the park. In late December, 13 were killed near West Yellowstone, Mont., when they were hit on U.S. Route 191 by a semi-truck after dark. Collisions are not uncommon: The animals’ dark brown color and the fact their eyes don’t reflect headlights the way that the eyes of a deer do make them very difficult to see at night.
So far this year, 22 have been hit by vehicles; the Buffalo Field Campaign has organized volunteers to dig paths through the snow to allow the bison to migrate safely and stay off the highway.
In recent times, Native Americans have actively recruited and encouraged the growth of bison herds on reservations. About 82 tribes now have more than 20,000 bison in 65 herds, in an effort to reconnect to their history. And Yellowstone park officials, Mr. Sholly said, are helping to move bison to tribal lands.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve in a presidential cabinet, recently announced an outlay of $25 million to help conserve and restore the herds across the West.
Bison “are inextricably intertwined with Indigenous culture, grassland ecology and American history,” she said.
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