Ben Wittes: A Defiant Ukraine

Summary

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The Bulwark Podcast

Episode: Ben Wittes: A Defiant Ukraine

Date: February 11, 2026
Host: Tim Miller
Guest: Benjamin Wittes (Editor in Chief of Lawfare, Senior Fellow at Brookings, Author of Dog Shirt Daily)

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Episode Overview

This episode features a detailed on-the-ground report from Ukraine by Benjamin Wittes, who has just returned from Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa. He and Tim Miller discuss the humanitarian toll of Russia’s ongoing energy war, the resilience and defiance of Ukrainians, the perception of U.S. and European support, and implications for the war’s geopolitical future. The conversation then pivots to U.S. legal and political news, including the crumbling state of government law enforcement and reflections on the state of the Washington Post. Throughout, the tone is clear-eyed, spirited, at times bleak, but ultimately focused on the struggle for liberal democracy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Humanitarian Crisis: Ukraine’s Winter Energy Catastrophe

[02:49–11:36]

• Severity of Crisis Underreported

  • Wittes describes the situation as much worse than depicted in the American press, emphasizing widespread loss of heat, electricity, and water.
    • "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...The Russians have been hitting electrical plants, hitting heating plants. It’s so cold that if you don’t have heating and electricity, the pipes freeze very quickly." — Benjamin Wittes [02:49]
  • The crisis is impacting entire cities, with significant variance:
    • Kharkiv, though closer to the front, is faring slightly better than Kyiv due to a more distributed power system.
    • Many people live in "subsistence conditions," using tents on beds for insulation.
  • Deaths have occurred, especially among the vulnerable.
    • "There was an old lady who was actually a survivor of Babi Yar...who died in her apartment the other day. In the cold. It’s bad." — Wittes [09:13]

• Personal Relief Efforts

  • Wittes and Ukrainian host Nastya have personally raised $80,000 to buy large batteries and supplies to help keep individuals warm.
    • "We have now raised $80,000 and spent as much of it as we can get into the country on just buying individuals stuff...It really is down to a person to person kind of thing." — Wittes [10:55]
  • Direct aid is urgent, but the scale of the state-inflicted crisis is daunting.

• Intentionally Inflicted Suffering

  • The energy crisis is described as an act of state violence by Russia.
    • "It’s maddening partly because it’s intentionally inflicted." — Wittes [10:01]

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2. Resilience and Defiance: Life on the Frontlines

[13:20–21:12]

• Kharkiv: Defiant Under Fire

  • Despite regular bombardments and severe damage, life and routines continue.
    • "People go to work, people get up in the morning and have days and there are very few buildings that are not scarred...But the city does continue to exist and function and in a way that’s kind of breathtaking." — Wittes [13:20]
  • Vivid anecdote: A Kharkiv military officer told Wittes,
    • "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." — Wittes [15:32]

• Social Fabric: Community Amid Ruins

  • Kharkiv’s “chi chi” cafes operate right next to bombed out buildings; daily life persists amid destruction.
    • "You can be inside [a café] and really have no sense that you’re not in Paris or Stockholm...but you look out the window and there is a bombed out building on the other side of the street. [My host] said, 'That view is why I wanted you to meet me here.'" — Wittes [20:10]

• National Mood: “We’re Not on the Verge of Collapse”

  • Despite bleak conditions and U.S. political rhetoric, Ukrainians are not close to surrender or collapse.
    • "Despite what Trump is saying every few weeks, the Ukrainians are not about to collapse...they’re in a situation in which their resources are stretched extremely thin, but the other side’s resources are also stretched extremely thin." — Wittes [05:22]

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3. Negotiation, Territory, and Humanity

[16:20–19:15]

• War Goals vs. Reality

  • When asked about willingness to negotiate, Ukrainians maintain maximal objectives (full territorial restoration, return of kidnapped children, reparations) but also recognize real limits.
    • "If you say, what is a just and fair and reasonable outcome, they say, 'get the fuck out of our territory...' But if you say, is a ceasefire going to include withdrawal of Russian forces from currently occupied territory? They’ll say, 'of course not.'" — Wittes [17:06]
  • For many, concern for occupied compatriots supersedes regaining territory.
    • "Americans talk about territory as though it’s land. For us it’s the people living under that occupation that is the real concern...I think most people will tell you they’re more immediately concerned about people." — Wittes [18:20]

• Unbreakable Ties to Home

  • "They don’t want to be driven out of their homes... there's a lot of obstinacy that people come by well and legitimately." — Wittes [19:19]

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4. The West and Ukraine: Betrayal, Dependence, and Realpolitik

[21:12–34:49]

• Ukrainian Views on American Support

  • Feelings are complex: a mix of admiration for U.S. ideals, reliance, and sharp sense of betrayal.
    • "There’s a historic sentimental attachment to us...And partly for that reason, there’s a real sense of betrayal." — Wittes [21:15]
  • For Americans, witnessing Ukrainian suffering creates a sense of “embarrassment” for how the U.S. has prioritized its own “imaginary” political grievances.
    • "There’s something embarrassing about being there...we made up problems to hate each other about and then we tore our society apart over them...and they’re being bombed by the Russians." — Wittes [24:01]

• The “Unbombed”

  • Ukrainians refer to privileged outsiders as "the unbombed", a label Wittes says fits Americans and helps underscore the disconnect between real crises and U.S. political dysfunction.

• Geopolitics: The Putin “Victory” Scenario

  • Discussion of a scenario where Putin consolidates current gains, forcibly russifies occupied territory, and continues regional provocations—a slow-motion “victory.”
    • Wittes: "The ambition that you describe is exactly what he’s trying to do...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." [26:13]
  • Ukraine and Europe both wary of relying on the U.S., knowing American support now swings violently by administration.
    • "For the foreseeable future [Europe] will not be able to restore the closeness of the relationship because we change course every four years." — Wittes [30:43]

• Ukrainian Diplomatic Agility

  • Praises Ukraine’s ability to “whittle away” at difficult U.S. relationships, extracting necessary support without humiliating appeasement.
    • "They’ve been very, very effective at managing this relationship. And that’s not because...that’s a credit to their diplomacy under enormous pressure." — Wittes [33:38]

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5. U.S. Law and Political Dysfunction

[36:27–43:44]

• Fulton County Affidavit Flaws

  • Wittes reacts to the release of an affidavit supporting the raid of the Fulton County election office, describing it as "a list of conspiracy theories that have been mostly debunked."
    • "The question of how an FBI agent actually filed that document like that one’s a mystery to me." — Wittes [37:16]
  • Raises concern about the failure of courts and law enforcement to check such moves.

• Staffing Crisis in Federal Law Enforcement

  • Acute shortages and institutional decay in key government offices undermine rule of law:
    • Example: 75% of U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota quit; only one lawyer left in Chicago CFTC office.
    • "Their lack of horses to carry out their lawfare seems to be a big problem for them at this point." — Miller [41:46]
    • Wittes: "It is shocking to watch it...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." [43:02]
  • Government disorganization tempers "malevolence", but leaves real cases—like sexual abuse and trafficking—unaddressed, resources diverted to “less important” priorities.
    • "The non availability of people because resources are being sucked up by deranged priorities is more norm than exception at this point." — Wittes [48:39]

• Challenges in Immigration Law

  • Circuit court splits are teeing up major Supreme Court decisions on issues like indefinite detention, tariffs, and birthright citizenship. Wittes warns broad Congressional statutes give administrations leeway to enact sweeping policies.
    • "My working assumption is that with most of the immigration law stuff...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." — Wittes [49:52]

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6. Washington Post and the Fate of Institutions

[51:47–55:31]

• Bezos Ownership and Institutional Decline
  • Wittes reflects on the rapid decay of the Washington Post, tying it to poor leadership and broader threats to journalism.
    • "It is in a death spiral now, and it is heading to one or either death by death or death by becoming...a 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..." — Wittes [51:56]
  • Notes the irony: as Lawfare expands global reporting, legacy media is retreating.
    • "I was in the weird position of suddenly realizing that Lawfare now has more employees in Ukraine than the Washington Post..." — Wittes [51:49]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Ukrainian Defiance:
  "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." — Benjamin Wittes [15:32]

• On the Energy Crisis:
  "It’s maddening partly because it’s intentionally inflicted...there’s something very evil about it. There’s something very upsetting about it. One of my hosts, Nastya...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." — Wittes [10:01]

• On American “Decadence”:
  "There’s something embarrassing about being there...we made up problems to hate each other about and then we tore our society apart over them...and they’re being bombed by the Russians." — Wittes [24:01]

• On Media & Institutions:
  "These institutions that seem very permanent are permanent until they’re not." — Wittes [55:20]

• On Law Enforcement Dysfunction:
  "I’ve watched this department for 30 years now, and I’ve never seen it be incompetent before...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." — Wittes [43:02]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Ukraine Energy Crisis and Relief Efforts: 02:49–11:36
• Kharkiv and Living on the Frontlines: 13:20–21:12
• Ukrainian Perspective on Negotiation and Occupation: 16:20–19:15
• Ukrainian-American Relations, “The Unbombed”: 21:12–24:50
• Putin’s Geopolitical Objectives: 26:13–28:12
• European Realignment and U.S. Trustworthiness: 30:43–34:49
• Fulton County Affidavit & Lawfare Dysfunction: 36:27–43:44
• Law Enforcement and Legal Staff Shortages: 41:46–48:54
• Immigration Law and Supreme Court Prognosis: 49:15–51:29
• Washington Post Meltdown and Institutional Permanence: 51:47–55:31

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Closing Thoughts

Wittes paints a vivid, harrowing, yet inspiring portrait of Ukraine’s struggle and spirit, lamenting both the U.S. and Europe’s inability to provide consistent support. The episode is a call to attention: for the humanitarian toll of war, the dangers of American political dysfunction, and the fragility of institutions. Throughout is a palpable respect for the stoicism and perseverance of ordinary Ukrainians in the face of targeted, calculated suffering—and an implicit challenge to listeners to be worthy allies.

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Transcript

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[Tim Miller]

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark 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 Wittes, of course. Hey man, how you been?

[Benjamin Wittes]

I'm good, thanks. I've been out of the country while they've been shooting people in the streets and so I feel like I caught a lucky break.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, you know, with the lights that you're shining on the buildings in D.C. you never know what kind of mass goon might be coming for you these days. Just for listeners, we were 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 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.

[Benjamin Wittes]

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, you know, begrudge anybody a 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 0 and negative 5, negative 7 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. It's a quite dangerous situation that is being intentionally inflicted on a civilian population. You know, so that is the first big thing that people, you know, 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, you know, 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, some time 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.

[Tim Miller]

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 Kalyn, who's reporting from out there, how I interviewed from time to time for YouTube or someone else. And I realized even myself, I kind of checked out of the day to day news from the front of the war because people get worn down. There's the new part of news and people get bored. It might not even really be biased. It's just there's other stuff happening. And so I started to check in more to Kiev Post, just kind of monitor what's happening. And it's 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?

[Benjamin Wittes]

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, 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 Kyiv, 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, Kyiv is really bad. And when you're on the Left bank in Kyiv, 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, you see a few windows lighted, and those are windows where somebody has a battery backup for their, 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?

[Tim Miller]

Yes, there are some people dying. Yes.

[Benjamin Wittes]

Yes, there are. There have definitely been deaths. There was a, an old lady who was actually a survivor of Bobby Yar the Holocaust in Kiev, 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.

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[Benjamin Wittes]

And let's face it, we have ice operating in the streets of Minnesota where it's also cold. Right.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[Benjamin Wittes]

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. It's bad.

[Tim Miller]

Is there anything on the battery campaign you want to mention?

[Benjamin Wittes]

So Nastya and I have 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 individuals stuff. And I'm really not sure what else to do, but it really is down to a person to person kind of thing.

[Tim Miller]

We'll include the link, if you wish, in the show notes.

[Benjamin Wittes]

That'd be great.

[Tim Miller]

As you know, eventually you get to a scale where it's like you're like the matching people become a problem.

[Benjamin Wittes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

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[Benjamin Wittes]

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, of Kyiv. You know, Kyiv, you can, 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. The, oh, there are office buildings that are. Office building. 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 normal. Ish. Kharkiv 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. And 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. The vibe that you get. It's this very fist in the air. We are here. We're not going anywhere. Fuck you.

[Tim Miller]

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, kind of 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, corruption issues with Zelensky, or the cold winter, or the fact that it's just been going on for so long that maybe the hard line position about 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? Do you think that's wrong?

[Benjamin Wittes]

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 ask, what are you more concerned about, the missing children or. Or territory that was lost, I think most people will tell you they're more immediately concerned about people. And, you know, 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.

[Tim Miller]

Listen, 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.

[Benjamin Wittes]

Them will not leave because those are their homes and their families were, you know, forced into collectivization by Stalin. Right. And there's, you know, there's a. There, 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, you know, these are real issues for a lot of 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, like.

[Tim Miller]

The Toledo of Ukraine, I was going.

[Benjamin Wittes]

To say, like, like, imagine Pittsburgh before the Renaissance. Right. Like, and I came away sort of in awe of it. And, you know, I was having coffee with this woman, Kate Bohuslavska, who blogs on Twitter as Kate From Kharkiv.

[Tim Miller]

I've seen that.

[Benjamin Wittes]

And I have been kind of a fan of her blogging since the beginning of the full scale invasion. And so I, I went to have coffee with her and she took me to this like, very chi chi 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 Kharkiv in a nutshell. Right? It's angry, it's fierce, it's. It's not going anywhere. But it's also, you know, very substantially destroyed. And it really didn't do anything to deserve that.

[Tim Miller]

What do they think about us? How we've abandoned them?

[Benjamin Wittes]

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 seppuku 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, you know, halftime show, or the halftime show. And, 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 cor. 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.

[Tim Miller]

Right, our decadence.

[Benjamin Wittes]

Yeah, our decadence. Right. That we're, we're going to fight about whether the Fulton county theft of the election in 2000. We're going to make up things, we're going to get 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.

[Tim Miller]

The unbombed almost feels too nice to us in a certain way. You know what I mean? Like the problems identified by Donald Trump that animated people are mostly the figment of people's imagination.

[Benjamin Wittes]

Correct. We made up problems to hate each other about and then we tore our society apart over them and claimed, as.

[Tim Miller]

The vice president said, that we don't have social cohesion anymore. Right. Because of the imaginary pet eaters next.

[Benjamin Wittes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

The unbombed, the unserious, the unreal. I don't know. We need, 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's kind of an interesting scenario because it's like different than the way I had imagined it in my head. So I want to positive 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, there'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 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 reemerges as like the leader of Greater Russia. Maybe he takes over Belarus and they have some kind of Belarusian, Baltic, Ukrainian, Russian, Greater Russia and That's kind of how things look in 2030. 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.

[Benjamin Wittes]

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 happen to happen. Right. Whether it's planes crashing in Poland. Right. There are these things that happen. The, you know, the Finns and the Estonians 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 Transdnistria 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 are how many of the Western powers 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.

[Tim Miller]

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[Benjamin Wittes]

Because it was before I went to Ukraine.

[Tim Miller]

But at the time one of my Canadian buddies said that Carney's just feeding you some red meats. You as an anti Trumper are just kind of like his, 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. This notion that the US 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 a month later, Trump has tacoed on Greenland. You know, we got, we're going through 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 just got to deal with Europe now?

[Benjamin Wittes]

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 US Europe relationship, on which I am not a particular expert, has taken a huge amount of damage, and Europe will not, for the foreseeable future, be able to restore the closeness 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, rah, America's back. How do they know that four years later they don't get, you know, Donald Trump Jr. Right.

[Tim Miller]

Or, or J.D. vance? And a lot of them, I think, rightly think JD Vance is maybe worse for them. Maybe not as far as existential risk is concerned, because Trump is an insane person. But, but just from a ideological standpoint, right.

[Benjamin Wittes]

I mean, JD 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.

[Tim Miller]

Thank you. This would not be the place to.

[Benjamin Wittes]

Try 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 Witcoff Peace plan, where Trump, you know, announces in public his. 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, and, 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 Americans happy. And so, you know, it's a, 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.

[Tim Miller]

It's hard to have respect for anyone calling Trump daddy. I think that, I think that goes beyond appropriate diplomatic management.

[Benjamin Wittes]

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[Tim Miller]

All right, let's do the lawfare hat for a few topics. You mentioned the aforementioned Fulton county raid.

[Benjamin Wittes]

Should I put on my barrister's wig for this part?

[Tim Miller]

Put on your barrister's wig, please. Yep. Oh great. We're really going to do that.

[Benjamin Wittes]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

Love that. The latest news on the LA Fair 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 me. 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, the Winnie the Pooh and the Tuxedo version of the Sidney Powell Fever dream list.

[Benjamin Wittes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

I guess it's probably a friend of the director was probably involved at some level.

[Benjamin Wittes]

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 detector about where they come from, you 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, 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 to put a check on the crazy.

[Tim Miller]

Katie's sharing with me that this is one of those things. It's like sometimes you read the news, like, is this real? A lawyer for the Gateway Pundit, which is a conspiracy rag, advised outlet that Kevin Moncia, 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 Gateway pundits 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.

[Benjamin Wittes]

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, and I don't mean to rag on the poor magistrate here. They have nothing except. Except the documents that are put in front of them. They don't hear from defense lawyers. They don't. 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.

[Tim Miller]

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 effort. To borrow a term from you, the prosecutor shortage is, you know, we went through this with Lindsey Halligan, like, trying to find somebody to do a sham indictment against Jim Comey. We discussed that, I think, 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 Gene Coastin yesterday about how at the CFTC in Chicago, where they do most of the oversight of derivatives criming, 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.

[Benjamin Wittes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

You want everybody besides Pam Bondi to have a good lawyer.

[Benjamin Wittes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

You sure?

[Benjamin Wittes]

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, yeah. 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.

[Tim Miller]

The most, I think, like, shocking anecdote that demonstrated just how dire their situation is was that guy. Chad Mazel, 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.

[Benjamin Wittes]

And there was this woman in Minnesota who goes in front of a judge, all but asks to be held in contempt.

[Tim Miller]

No, not all but asks says, hold me in contempt. I need a good night's sleep because.

[Benjamin Wittes]

I need a decent night's sleep. But then also says, you know, this. 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 freakout 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.

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[Tim Miller]

Speaking of things that they're 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 Bloomington, Minnesota. They arrested Rashad Johnson out of Maple Grove in 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 was, that is reviewing the new ICE agents was also doing some sex trafficking?

[Benjamin Wittes]

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 you 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, fare evasion in the District of Columbia on bus.

[Tim Miller]

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.

[Benjamin Wittes]

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.

[Tim Miller]

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 from the 5th Circuit, which covers my, my part of the world, the redneck circuit.

[Benjamin Wittes]

That's why your part of the world is so great, because the fifth Circuit has made that part of America great again.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, things are going great in 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, they're like 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 tear offs and birthright citizenship and other SCOTUS showdowns, but this is another, I think, big one coming towards the court.

[Benjamin Wittes]

Look, I don't think it is a bad thing to have relatively swift conflicts between the circuits on these things because it forces the Supreme Court to take responsibility for them rather than to sort of shadow docket. It's, 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, 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, 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.

[Tim Miller]

I agree it's going to be tough and we're not to give them the backbone because I think there's a lot of Democrats that say touching immigration is not worth that shouldn't be a priority. And 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 were an editorial writer there for a decade.

[Benjamin Wittes]

I was there for almost 10 years.

[Tim Miller]

And so I guess, do you have any Parting thoughts for the podcast and for your former employer.

[Benjamin Wittes]

Yeah, I mean, I was in Kyiv 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 an odd feeling. No, I mean, it's tragic. It's a great institution and. 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. 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, and 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. 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.

[Tim Miller]

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.

[Benjamin Wittes]

Yes. First of all, you know, 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 Postie 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 I, you know, there's, there is something weird and ironic about that, that these institutions that seem very permanent are permanent until they're not.

[Tim Miller]

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 the effort to get folks batteries there. Appreciate that, man. It's good to see you with the barrister hat and keep us posted.

[Benjamin Wittes]

All right, will do.

[Tim Miller]

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 Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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