A former volunteer for Ukraine’s International Legion has branded Ryan Wesley Routh, the suspect in a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump, as “delusional” and a “liar” over his claims that he recruited for the Ukrainian organization.
Routh, 58, is in custody after an attempt was made on the life of Trump, 78, at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where shots were fired on Sunday.
Trump survived “what appears to be an assassination attempt” the FBI said. The former president was “safe following gunshots in his vicinity” at his golf club, the Trump campaign said.
The suspected gunman claimed in a June 2022 interview with Newsweek Romania that he recruited volunteers for the International Legion Defense of Ukraine, a unit of Ukraine’s Ground Forces.
He also spoke with The New York Times in 2023, claiming to have attempted to recruit Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban to the Ukrainian army.
Russia has seized on his claims to push the unfounded allegation that Routh could have been recruited by Ukraine to make an attempt on the life of the former U.S. president, who has criticized the scale of U.S. support and military aid for Kyiv amid the war, which is now in its third year.
“I wonder what would happen if it turned out that the failed new Trump shooter Routh, who recruited mercenaries for the Ukrainian army, was himself hired by the neo-nazi regime in Kiev for this assassination attempt?” asked former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday.
But the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine said in a statement that Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, North Carolina, had “never been part of, associated with, or linked” to it “in any capacity.”
Evelyn Aschenbrenner, a U.S. citizen from Detroit, Michigan, who worked with the International Legion beginning in March 2022—first in administration, and then as a recruiter—for a total of two years, also told Newsweek on Monday from Kyiv that they had been in contact with Routh since 2022, and that he is “delusional and a liar.”
Aschenbrenner, who left the International Legion in mid-June of this year, had warned on social media since June that Routh is “not, and never has been, associated with the International Legion or the Ukrainian Armed Forces at all.”
Routh messaged Aschenbrenner between March 2022 and March 2024, sending details of potential recruits, including a list of some 6,000 Afghani citizens. He would then become “hostile” and “manipulative” when told to refrain from doing so.
Newsweek has been sent an exchange of messages between Aschenbrenner and Routh.
“He said, ‘Oh you don’t really want to help Ukraine’. He was very emotionally, like, twisting like that, where if you refused to help or pushed back against him, he was very accusatory. He never listened to anything that I said, he didn’t register,” Aschenbrenner said.
“He sent me a PDF of, like, 6,000 Afghani citizens. They can’t legally enter Europe. He was combative. He was argumentative. He refused repeatedly to understand basic army policy,” Aschenbrenner said.
An encounter with Routh on August 24, 2022, Ukraine’s independence day, is when Aschenbrenner “first really realized [Routh] was not firing with all pistons up there.”
“There was an increased security alert [due to] strikes from Russia, and because of that, there was curfew. I think it was 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. in Kharkiv, and [he wanted] to get a foreign person over the border to join Legion. And I’m like, not today, dude,” Aschenbrenner said.
“I do think he seemed to be a little delusional, I don’t think he thought he was a real recruiter, but I thought he really he believed that he was helping Ukraine, and he was the only one who could help Ukraine doing what he did.”
Aschenbrenner was angered when Routh in February 2023 posted their personal details online, promising individuals the chance to fight in Ukraine.
“[He] started giving out my phone number, another person’s phone number, and after getting phone calls from soldiers from Uganda…I had several arguments with him on Signal to say, this is not a service that anyone wants or needs.”
“I don’t know if he’s ever been in Ukraine, but he seemed to have this…like he was the only one who could help save Ukraine — if you didn’t do exactly what he wanted when he wanted, somehow you were helping Russia win. I was like, that’s dramatic,” Aschenbrenner said.
Aschenbrenner added: “There seems to be a lot going on. There was delusions of grandeur and [he was] very disconnected from reality.”
Routh could appear in a Florida court on Monday, according to media reports.
In his interview with Newsweek Romania, he had said: “The question as far as why I’m here … to me, a lot of the other conflicts are grey, but this conflict is definitely black and white. This is about good versus evil. This is a storybook, you know, any movie we’ve ever watched, this is definitely evil against good.”
A Semafor report published on March 10, 2023, cited Routh as the head of the International Volunteer Center (IVC) in Ukraine, a private organization that works to “empower volunteers” and other nonprofit groups that work to “enhance the distribution of humanitarian aid throughout Ukraine,” according to the IVC’s website.
Routh’s account on X, formerly Twitter, has been suspended. However, Newsweek has seen their contents before the suspension.
On X, Routh posted dozens of times in support of Ukraine. In March 2022, for example, shortly after the full-scale invasion, he wrote: “I AM WILLING TO FLY TO KRAKOW AND GO TO THE BORDER OF UKRAINE TO VOLUNTEER AND FIGHT AND DIE … Can I be the example We must win.”
Earlier posts appear to indicate a shift in his political stance. In June 2020, in a post tagging Trump’s account, he wrote: “While you were my choice in 2106, I and the world hoped that president Trump would be different and better than the candidate, but we all were greatly disappointment and it seems you are getting worse and devolving.”
“I will be glad when you gone,” he added.
More recently, his support for Ukraine continued. In April 2024, Routh tagged Elon Musk in another X post, writing: “I would like to buy a rocket from you. I wish to load it with a warhead for Putins Black sea mansion bunker to end him. Can you give me a price please.”
Do you have a tip on a world news story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about the Russia-Ukraine war? Let us know via <a href=”mailto:worldnews@newsweek.com”>worldnews@newsweek.com</a>.
A Justice Department (DOJ) indictment revealing Russia’s use of conservative influencers to peddle its viewpoints has shined a light on its newest tactics for tapping into existing right-leaning media to push its agenda.
An indictment unsealed by the department last week shows two employees of RT, formerly known as Russia Today, contracted with conservative Tenet Media to offer lucrative contracts to its band of influencers, including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson.
Those influencers have mirrored the DOJ’s language, calling themselves unwitting participants in the scheme and in some cases victims of the operation.
The State Department on Friday indicated RT’s efforts were even broader than those revealed by the DOJ, noting the outlet similarly hired a French influencer to push its viewpoints there.
But the episode shows how the conservative media landscape is ripe for being co-opted by Russia, raising questions about the extent to which the U.S. adversary has sought to steer existing media.
Laura Thornton, senior director of global democracy programs at the McCain Institute, said the plot marked the first time the “DOJ has exposed these direct linkages.”
“We’ve seen Russian state media amplify existing narratives and use their bot farms or other sites to spread that information. But in terms of directly paying for an American media company to produce content on their behalf, this is quite unusual,” she told The Hill.
“Given that a lot of the false information and pro-Russia narratives actually come from within, it’s much easier to just throw a flame on those tinders,” she added. “The influencers themselves are claiming that they didn’t really change their content, which to me is almost even more alarming. They’re not being paid to change things because they already are [broadcasting] pro-Kremlin, pro-Russian disinformation narratives.”
The DOJ didn’t identify the players involved, but details in the indictment make clear some identities, including that of Tenet Media, which like the company listed in the filing describes itself as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.”
Its owners, Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, took in some $10 million in contracts from sources they referred to in internal communications as “the Russians.”
The two relayed the name of a fake investor, Eduard Grigoriann, to influencers who were paid handsomely for a series of videos that were in fact funded by the Russian government through two employees of RT.
One of those employees, Elena Afanasyeva, later “edited, posted, and directed the posting … of hundreds of videos” at Tenet.
Some of the content reviewed in the indictment promoted key Russian talking points, including a video of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson visiting a Russian grocery store. Though one producer at Tenet initially raised concerns that it “just feels like overt shilling,” they acquiesced and shared the content the next day.
In another case, Afanasyeva wanted to promote the “Ukraine/U.S. angle” in the wake of a terror attack in Moscow, despite reports indicating ISIS had claimed responsibility for the attack. Nevertheless, one of the influencers said “he’s happy to cover it.”
Many of the influencers involved in the plot say they were unaware of the Russian involvement and never shifted their content.
“Never at any point did anyone other than I have full editorial control of the show and the contents of the show are often apolitical,” Pool said in a statement on social platform X shortly after the indictment was unsealed.
Pool and Johnson referred to themselves as victims of the plot.
“The FBI has notified me that I am the victim of a crime. [Attorney General] Merrick Garland said the same in his press conference. I am the only person who ever had editorial control of my program. Period,” Johnson said on X.
In another statement, he said he had been involved in a “standard, arms length deal, which was later terminated.”
But they’ve faced criticism for not being more skeptical of the high-dollar contracts they were offered, as well as questions about why their messaging was appealing to a U.S. adversary in the first place.
“They’re also claiming, of course, that they were themselves deceived, in which case, I guess the question really is, they should ask themselves why they were chosen — why their messaging is in such lockstep with Russian disinformation in the first place,” Thornton said.
“Why do we have this constituency in our country? And that, to me, is more concerning and makes life a lot easier for the Russians, because then they can just retweet what our own congressperson is saying or our own media.”
Ben Dubow, a fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis who studies disinformation efforts, said the large existing followings are a major part of the appeal for Russia. Johnson and Rubin have about 2.5 million followers on YouTube, while Pool has 1.4 million.
“I would not be shocked if there were other incidents of this. What attracts Russia to influencers like this is kind of the isolationism, which is very directly related to Russian interest. The other is just promoting cleavages within American society. And there are a lot of people on social media who make their living essentially doing exactly that,” he said.
But others see a severe lack of due diligence on the part of influencers who were receiving significant sums to make the content. One of the influencers was paid $400,000 a month while another was given $100,000 per video.
They were given a false profile of Grigoriann after asking about the source of financing, though the indictment notes there were little results on Google for anyone by that name and none associated with the bank he claimed to work with.
“I would love to be a victim of a crime where I get paid $400,000,” quipped A.J. Bauer, a professor at the University of Alabama who studies right-wing media.
“Even if they were unaware that Russia was the one providing the funds, if somebody’s giving you $100,000 per podcast episode, that should raise some questions, right? Who’s bankrolling this?”
He described the conservative media landscape as a highly entrepreneurial space that has long been funded by wealthy Americans seeking to influence public opinion — a legal activity when pushed by U.S. citizens.
He said there will likely be a lasting impact for the influencers.
“Among right wing folks there has been an increasing sympathy with Russia, but I still think that a lot of conservatives and right wingers don’t necessarily want to follow somebody who is overtly engaging in propaganda or who would be willing to, and so I think that’s probably going to damage their reputations mid-term,” he said.
“I would imagine that they can kind of rebrand themselves [in the long term]. They’ve done so multiple times already.”
The consequences have been most severe for Chen and Donovan, who have gone silent since the indictment dropped. The indictment notes that neither ever registered as a foreign agent, raising the specter that additional charges could be coming.
YouTube took down content from Chen and Tenet Media while Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media said it had terminated a contract it had with Chen. The YouTube channels for Pool, Johnson and Rubin were not impacted.
Tenet Media declined to respond to a request for comment.
Russia has been ramping up its use of RT, which the State Department accused Friday of having ties to Russian intelligence.
“We know that for over two years, RT has leveraged its extensive state funding to covertly recruit and pay social media personalities and provide them with unbranded content to disseminate and promote around the world while hiding RT’s involvement,” the State Department wrote.
It’s not clear, however, just how wide an audience the Russian-backed content reached.
The indictment says the company posted about 2,000 videos since launching, generating about 16 million views.
But Dubow said that’s not as much of a splash as one might think. He said advertisers expect to spend $10-$15 per every thousand views while content creators often get about $1 for every thousand impressions they generate. By either metric, Russia was spending orders of magnitude more than market rates to reach a relatively small audience.
“It really does look like the influencers got the best of this deal, as opposed to Russia really achieving all that much with it,” he said.
But Thornton stressed that $10 million is a drop in the bucket for Russia, which has advanced its influence operations since 2016 and also faces its own internal unrest as it engages in war with Ukraine.
“Russia has never had more of an incentive to interfere with our elections than it does today,” she said.
“They are facing an existential threat, right? And the war in Ukraine and how it turns out for Russia is their entire future. And a lot of it is going to depend on who the next president of the United States is. So if ever they’ve had an incentive to get involved in our politics, I would say this is the year.”
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Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russian state media have cited Larry C. Johnson in hundreds of news articles and TV reports. They frequently present his views on the Russian-Ukrainian war and the West’s role, referring to him as a former CIA analyst, despite his short tenure with the agency more than 35 years ago. The Kremlin uses Johnson’s often false and misleading claims to promote pro-Russian narratives and improve its image.
RIA Novosti
RIA Novosti is a Russia’s major domestic state news agency with a website audience of upwards of 10 million daily users. From August 1, 2023, to September 12, 2024, Ria.ru published 403 materials citing Johnson’s statements.
On April 22, 2024, RIA Novosti, quoting Johnson’s interview with the YouTube channel Dialogue Works, stated that by “end of summer, maybe sooner,” Ukraine will lose the war to Russia and the Ukrainian city of Odesa, which he called Russian, will come under Moscow’s control.
In reality, Ukraine not only didn’t surrender but also launched a successful counteroffensive, capturing nearly 1,300 square kilometers of Russia’s Kursk region.
As for Odesa allegedly being a Russian city, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a similar false statement on December 15, 2023. Voice of America debunked Putin’s claim.
Odesa was founded in the 14th century as the Tatar fortress Khadzhibey and passed through Lithuanian, Polish and Turkish control before Russia took it by force in 1792. Russia renamed it Odesa in 1795 and ruled it for 126 years.
For the past 105 years, Odesa has been part of Ukraine. Contrary to Russian imperial myths, the city was never predominantly Russian; by 2001, Ukrainians were the majority, and as of 2015, 68% of residents were ethnic Ukrainians.
Sputnik
Sputnik is another Russian state-run news agency, and since August 8, 2023, it has published 280 materials with quotes from Johnson.
On March 31, Sputnik, citing Johnson’s interview on the YouTube channel Judge Napolitano – Judging Freedom, claimed that the March 22, 2024, terrorist attack at Crocus Concert Hall in Moscow was allegedly organized by Ukraine through an intermediary, with the U.S. and Great Britain as the masterminds behind the entire “operation.”
This false statement by Johnson coincides with the Kremlin’s information campaign blaming Ukraine and the West for this terrorist attack.
The state-owned broadcaster Russia Today, or RT, has published 163 articles with Johnson quotes and videos.
On August 29, 2023, RT, citing Johnson, reported a pro-Kremlin hoax that “Zelensky very well could be ousted in a coup within the next three to four weeks because of the great disgruntlement among troops on the eastern front.”
On August 8, 2023, Izvestia reported that, according to Johnson, Ukrainian air defenses had been almost completely destroyed, “so that Russian aircraft can now fly unhindered or almost unhindered throughout the territory of Ukraine.”
In fact, in August 2023, Russian aircraft were avoiding entering Ukrainian airspace to stay out of range of Ukraine’s air defense systems.
The Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta had 299 news items with Larry C. Johnson’s name.
On June 16, 2024, Rossiyskaya Gazeta published Johnson’s unsubstantiated prediction, aligned with Kremlin narratives, stating: “If the West rejects Moscow’s peace plan, the Kyiv regime could soon lose control not only of Odesa but also of the capital.”
Lenta.ru, a mainstream news site owned by the Russian government through a subsidiary of the Sberbank state bank, published 445 articles containing statements by the “former CIA analyst.”
In January 2024, Johnson gave an interview to Channel One, a Russian state-owned TV channel, in which he promoted narratives indistinguishable from Kremlin propaganda: Ukraine has no chance in a war with Russia, Ukraine’s air force and air defenses are destroyed, Russia is an industrial giant, and the West cannot compete with it.
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The man accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump may have had inside information on his movements, a former FBI assistant director said.
Chris Swecker told Newsweek that law enforcement will have to establish how Ryan Wesley Routh appeared to know the exact details of when Trump was playing golf at a Florida resort.
Shots were fired at Trump National Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday where Trump, the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, was golfing. No injuries have been reported, according to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
The FBI later said it was joining the investigation into the shooting.
Swecker, who retired from the Bureau as assistant director with responsibility over all FBI criminal investigations, said Routh appeared to be a “wingnut” who hated authority.
“The biggest question to answer is: ‘How did the would-be assassin know to be at that location at that time?'” he said. “There are only three possible answers: He guessed and got very lucky; he conducted surveillance on Trump and followed him to the golf course or he had inside information about Trump’s schedule.
“The last answer is scary and has implications that another person was involved.”
West Palm Beach Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said at a news conference on Sunday that a U.S. Secret Service agent spotted the barrel of a rifle sticking out the fence of the golf course and “engaged” with the suspect. The gunman may have got to within 300 yards of Trump, law enforcement said at the conference.
In a Facebook post on Sunday afternoon, the Martin County Sheriff’s Office said that it had “stopped a vehicle and taken a suspect into custody believed to be connected to a shooting incident at Trump International in Palm Beach County.”
Swecker, who retired from the FBI in 2006 and is now an attorney based in Charlotte, North Carolina, said that it may be time to tone down some of the rhetoric on the former president.
“There is little doubt that the demonization of Trump is resonating with the fringe elements who are mentally unstable and highly impressionable, so it may be time to tone it down a bit,” he said.
He said Routh had been involved in some “strange quests,” including trying to get Afghan fighters into Ukraine to fight the Russians.
“We know this suspect has posted about Trump being a danger to democracy and he has been active on some strange quests: visiting Ukraine to round up Afghan fighters so motive is coming into focus—he is a wing nut who dislikes authority, based on his arrest record for resisting arrest in a two-hour standoff,” Swecker said.
That is a reference to an incident in 2002, when Routh was driving without a valid license and was stopped by police. He then sped off and barricaded himself inside his own roofing company for three hours before surrendering.
He was charged with carrying a concealed weapon, resisting a police officer and driving without a valid license among other charges.
Swecker said Routh believed those saying that Trump is an existential threat to democracy and allegedly decided to take matters into his own hands.
The shooting comes two months after Trump was struck by a bullet that pierced his right ear at an outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. The 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, who fired rounds off a nearby roof was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper.
From time to time when Jonah Goldberg appears on CNN, he and the other panelists are asked to make political predictions.
Sometimes that’s easy. For instance, one can safely predict that Donald Trump isn’t going to win his “absolute immunity” case before the Supreme Court, just as surely as he wasn’t going to lose the case brought against Colorado for barring him from the ballot there.
But it feels unfair to ask Jonah and the rest of the gang to go on guessing what will happen in a modern presidential campaign, when insanely destabilizing “October surprises” have become standard procedure. The only safe prediction in 2024 is that the race will be upended by something completely unpredictable.
It wasn’t always that way, dear reader. I am an old-ish man, yet the only meaningful October surprise of my lifetime until 2016 came when word leaked before Election Day 2000 that George W. Bush had once been arrested for driving under the influence. In the end, that might have tilted enough votes to Al Gore to spoil an otherwise clear-cut victory for the Republican, plunging the country into the nightmare of a contested election.
Imagine: Within living memory, before Americans got comfortable with coup plots and porn-star payoffs, something like a youthful DUI arrest was scandalous enough to endanger a candidate’s presidential chances. Things are different now.
Part of the reason there have been so few meaningful October surprises is that few presidential contests over the last 40 years remained close enough to be scrambled by one. From the start of the Reagan Revolution in 1980 to its demise in 2016, only the two races won by Bush 43 were tight on Election Day. Barack Obama and John McCainmight have ended up in a dogfight if not for the financial crisis that struck in the fall of 2008, but I doubt it. Disillusionment with Bush was so broad and excitement for the first black president was so high that I suspect Obama would have won comfortably regardless, if not quite as comfortably as he did.
With that as context, let me ask: Do you fully appreciate how bananas the last two presidential cycles have been with respect to October—or at least election-year—surprises?
In both races, not one, a computer that may or may not have contained evidence of the Democratic nominee’s criminality surfaced weeks before the vote, in bizarre circumstances.
In 2016, the FBI reopened its “Emailgate” probe of Hillary Clinton at the eleventh hour after it stumbled across communications from her on a device belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner, whom it was investigating for, er, sexting a 15-year-old. That surprise might have cost Clinton the election. Four years later, a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden turned up at a random Delaware computer repair shop containing emails implying corruption by Joe Biden. Intelligence experts rushed to reassure the press that the laptop was a Russian disinformation operation. Oops: It wasn’t. Biden held on to win by the skin of his teeth.
Those weren’t the only surprises in 2016 and 2020, though. In both races, not one, a hugely influential Supreme Court justice up and died in the thick of the campaign.
Neither was an “October” surprise, strictly speaking. Antonin Scalia passed away in February of 2016 while Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed in September of 2020, but their deaths very well might have decided the outcome of each year’s presidential race. For Republicans, filling the Scalia vacancy was a compelling reason to set aside their misgivings about Trump. For undecided voters fresh off of watching Amy Coney Barrett’s light-speed confirmation, thwarting a further conservative takeover of the court might have made the difference for Biden in swing states he won by razor-thin margins.
In the Trump era, when every presidential election is 50-50 and no one trusts anyone, October surprises seem not just likely but unavoidable. And so while it’s unfair to ask Jonah or anyone else to anticipate how freakishly strange 2024 might get, it’s an understandable question. There will be some unexpected jolt to the campaign, one assumes. We might as well start speculating about what it’ll be.
I have a prediction.
It’s tempting to assume that an October surprise will matter less this year than in previous cycles because of how well the public already knows both candidates and how strongly it feels about them. If you’re voting for Biden, the election is about democracy or abortion or climate change; if you’re voting for Trump, it’s about inflation or immigration or “retribution.” There isn’t much room politically for an October surprise to matter.
It’s tempting to believe that. But it’s wrong.
The opposite is closer to the truth. Because so many Americans doubt that either candidate is fit for office, a sudden jolt to the race near Election Day could tilt them decisively toward one or the other. Look no further than last week’s verdict in Manhattan for evidence that certain “disengaged voters” who currently favor Trump will reconsider if met with a big enough “surprise.” According to New York Times political analyst Nate Cohn, a small but meaningful share has already switched to Biden following Trump’s conviction:
A potentially crucial sliver of Mr. Trump’s former supporters—3 percent—now told us they’ll back Mr. Biden, while another 4 percent say they’re now undecided. … The shift was especially pronounced among the young, nonwhite and disengaged Democratic-leaning voters who have propelled Mr. Trump to a lead in the early polls. Of the people who previously told us they had voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but would vote for Mr. Trump in 2024, around one-quarter now said they would instead stick with Mr. Biden.
Voters who dislike both candidates—who have been dubbed double haters—were especially likely to defect from Mr. Trump.
There’s also anecdotal evidence that “double haters” have been moved by the verdict. When political consultant Sarah Longwell interviewed a panel of nine two-time Trump voters who have since soured on him but are leery of supporting the president, she found post-verdict that five are now leaning toward voting for Biden.
An October surprise will matter, maybe more than it ever has. So what’ll it be?
The most tumultuous possibility is a health crisis for either candidate. Biden wouldn’t recover politically from one; doubts about his physical and mental fitness run too deep for a trip to the hospital to be successfully “messaged” away. Trump would fare better unless his crisis was plainly debilitating, partly because the public has more confidence in his baseline health and partly because his lunatic fans would insist that Biden had him poisoned or whatever. But it would hurt him, surely, by demonstrating that the health gap between him and Old Man Joe is smaller than we thought.
The political dynamics of another Supreme Court justice keeling over would favor Democrats, especially if the deceased were a Democratic appointee. It’d be 2016 in reverse. At the time, Republicans couldn’t bear the thought of the great Scalia’s death producing a 5-4 liberal advantage on the court. Eight years later, Democrats are facing a 6-3 conservative advantage that probably won’t be undone for a generation and might not be undone for two generations if it slips to 7-2.
Nothing would get disaffected progressives to set aside their qualms about voting for Biden like the near-term prospect of Supreme Court Justice Aileen Cannon would. Given what happened in 2016 and 2020, if I were Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan I’d go get that check-up at the doctor’s office that I’ve been putting off.
Both of those are what we might call “actuarial” October surprises. But what about more foreseeable ones?
An obvious potential surprise is Trump being convicted in one of the three remaining criminal cases against him, but that’s a longshot that’s getting longer by the day.
The prosecution in Georgia, for example, is frozen indefinitely as an appellate court considers whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is too unethical to remain in charge. And the classified documents case is going nowhere as future Justice Cannon takes her sweet time moving forward, lately having paused to determine whether Special Counsel Jack Smith was lawfully appointed or not.
The pace of the third prosecution, related to trying to overturn the 2020 election, depends in part on how the Supreme Court rules on Trump’s “absolute immunity” claim. If it sends the matter back to the lower court to determine which of his acts at the time were “official” or not, that’ll slow things down enough to ensure that that one won’t make it to a jury before November either.
But if it does, and Trump is convicted? One would hope that would be the end of his presidential chances. Disengaged voters and “double haters” have already inched away from him after seeing him convicted on minor charges in New York; a jury verdict finding him criminally at fault for his coup plot four years ago might send undecided voters fleeing.
On the flip side, if a New York appellate court ends up overturning Trump’s conviction in Manhattan before November, that might be the end of Biden. Undecided voters might treat it as confirmation that Trump was right all along about Democrats waging illicit “lawfare” against him on trumped-up charges (no pun intended). The backlash would be fatal, especially after Team Joe spent so much time and energy hyping the fact that his opponent is a “convicted felon.”
Another “surprise” possibility: What if a well-timed “deepfake” of either candidate saying something outlandish and disqualifying emerges?
Don’t laugh. Biden has already been the victim of one during this campaign and his aides have used the prospect of it happening again as an excuse to suppress the audio of his interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur. Phony yet convincing audio and/or video of politicians caught in compromising situations will have “October surprise” potential in American elections forevermore. And in a race in which voters already doubt the fitness of both contenders and deeply distrust non-aligned media sources, it’s easy to imagine them lending undue weight to a “scandalous” recording that surfaces just before Election Day.
Imagine a tape of Biden struggling to remember his own name in a meeting with a foreign leader. Or envision the probably mythical audio of Donald Trump saying the N-word on the set of The Apprentice appearing after nine years of liberals trying and failing to verify that it exists. The country would divide instantly and bitterly over whether either recording was a high-tech dirty trick or shocking confirmation that the other side’s candidate is even less suited to being president than they assumed.
As a bonus, if the target of the deepfake ended up losing the election and then the nature of the fakery were exposed, his supporters would insist that the outcome had been effectively “rigged” and should be treated as illegitimate. It would be the “Hunter’s laptop” fiasco on steroids. Public faith in the integrity of American elections, already distressingly weak, would soften further.
It’s such an obvious and easy way to set Americans at each other’s throats that one wonders why Russia or China wouldn’t do it.
I think we’re likely to see a deepfake or two, or 10. But that’s not my prediction.
No, my prediction is this: At some point before November, intelligence sources will allege that Trump has been privately lobbying foreign leaders to undermine Biden’s policies.
“Biden’s policies” are America’s policies so long as he’s president. In better days, it would have been an unholy scandal for a presidential candidate to secretly undercut American policy abroad during a campaign for the selfish end of gaining an electoral advantage. But as we saw with the case of George W. Bush’s DUI, Things Are Different Now.
For instance, here’s something that I dare say wouldn’t have flown during the 2000 election.
Convicted Felon Trump says his good friend Putin will release WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich as soon as Trump wins the election, but he won’t do it if Biden wins. pic.twitter.com/EeUQLyzJyR
If you’re an American with enough juice abroad to get an American hostage released, you don’t refrain from using that influence until you get something that you want in return. Doing so has the air of a ransom demand, don’t you think?
In effect, Trump is lobbying Russia not to release Evan Gershkovich before November 5. He’s actually trying to extend the Wall Street Journal reporter’s captivity because he sees a benefit to himself in doing so. The possibility that Ronald Reagan’s campaign did something similar in 1980, conniving to delay the release of Americans held hostage by Iran until after the election, was so politically explosive that the matter is still being litigated more than 40 years later. Now here’s Trump conniving in plain sight.
With any other politician, it would feel unfair to speculate without evidence about them exploiting the foreign relationships they’ve built to undercut U.S. foreign policy. But in this case, character is destiny. Trump has done this before, after all: When he leaned on Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 for information on Joe Biden in exchange for duly appropriated American weapons, he was subordinating the country’s interests to his personal interests. Electoral considerations inevitably influence a president’s policy choices, but only one president has been so brazen as to use official policy to try to extort an ally for oppo research on his opponent.
He has no qualms in principle either about accepting foreign help to win an election. In 2016, Trump half-joked at a press conference that Russia should “find” Hillary Clinton’s missing emails and publish them. The same year, his campaign eagerly promoted material lifted by Russian hackers from computers owned by Democrats like John Podesta and laundered through Wikileaks. Although it came to nothing in the end, his son and other staffers sought Russian assistance in the election at a meeting at Trump Tower.
Trump is amoral, transactional, and desperate to regain the presidency in order to thwart the remaining criminal prosecutions he’s facing. Because there’s no civic priority that he holds more dearly than his own aggrandizement, there’s nothing to dissuade him from reaching out to Russia or China or whoever with offers of favors when he returns to office in exchange for them making trouble for Biden now. Remember, even with respect to an issue like immigration about which he really does care, he was willing to sabotage congressional efforts to ease the crisis at the border because he feared losing his electoral advantage on the issue.
The idea that an American citizen shouldn’t undermine his country’s foreign policy wouldn’t even cross his mind.
In early April, the New York Times reported that Trump had recently spoken by phone to Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, although the topic of conversation is unknown. Maybe they were just catching up. Or maybe Trump reminded him that rising oil prices are bad for an incumbent president in an election year. Or, maybe, they chatted about something else: “News of their discussion comes at a time when the Biden administration is engaged in delicate negotiations with the Saudis aimed at establishing a lasting peace in the Middle East,” the paper noted.
If Trump doesn’t want the border tightened until he’s president or Evan Gershkovich freed until he’s president, it would stand to reason that he wouldn’t want an Israel-Saudi peace accord signed until he’s president either. How would America react if it discovered in October that he had talked the Saudis out of making peace because he feared that doing so would help Biden?
A few weeks ago, NBC News published a report describing apprehension among U.S. officials that North Korea is preparing to “potentially take its most provocative military actions in a decade close to the U.S. presidential election, possibly at [Vladimir] Putin’s urging.” Russia doesn’t need any encouragement from Trump to spring an October surprise on Biden, no doubt regarding it as payback for the president’s support for Ukraine. But Trump is, of course, friendlier with Putin and Kim Jong Un than Biden is, and as president, he’d be far less likely to intervene in both countries’ spheres of influence.
He’d be the direct beneficiary of the October surprise they’re allegedly planning. What, precisely, would stop him from reaching out to either country and pledging his gratitude in advance if they decide to follow through on it?
An allegation before Election Day from U.S. intelligence that Trump had egged on some foreign malefactor to cause problems for America would explode like a grenade in the middle of the campaign. It would be a rerun of the Russiagate saga of 2017, except with suspicions of the other party’s malevolence an order of magnitude higher now than they were then. Outraged Republicans would insist that “the deep state” had unleashed its biggest hoax yet on Trump. (Unless Trump turned around and confirmed that he’d done it, I mean, at which point Republicans would pivot instantly to arguing that he’d done nothing wrong.) Democrats would counter that here was the smoking gun proving once and for all that Trump has been colluding with the international order’s most degenerate strongmen to empower authoritarianism globally.
It would be bedlam, unthinkable in any other era yet quite imaginable this summer or fall, I think. I’m already counting the hours. Things are different now.
PRAGUE (AP) — The head of NATO’s military committee said Saturday that Ukraine has the solid legal and military right to strike deep inside Russia to gain combat advantage — reflecting the beliefs of a number of U.S. allies — even as the Biden administration balks at allowing Kyiv to do so using American-made weapons.
“Every nation that is attacked has the right to defend itself. And that right doesn’t stop at the border of your own nation,” said Adm. Rob Bauer, speaking at the close of the committee’s annual meeting, also attended by U.S. Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Bauer, of Netherlands, also added that nations have the sovereign right to put limits on the weapons they send to Ukraine. But, standing next to him at a press briefing, Lt. Gen. Karel Řehka, chief of the General Staff of the Czech Armed Forces, made it clear his nation places no such weapons restrictions on Kyiv.
“We believe that the Ukrainians should decide themselves how to use it,” Řehka said.
Their comments came as U.S. President Joe Biden is weighing whether to allow Ukraine to use American-provided long-range weapons to hit deep into Russia. And they hint at the divisions over the issue.
Biden met with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Friday, after this week’s visit to Kyiv by their top diplomats, who came under fresh pressure to loosen weapons restrictions. U.S. officials familiar with discussions said they believed Starmer was seeking Biden’s approval to allow Ukraine to use British Storm Shadow missiles for expanded strikes in Russia.
Biden’s approval may be needed because Storm Shadow components are made in the U.S. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to share the status of private conversations, said they believed Biden would be amenable, but there has been no decision announced yet.
Providing additional support and training for Ukraine was a key topic at the NATO chiefs’ meeting, but it wasn’t clear Saturday if the debate over the U.S. restrictions was discussed.
Many of the European nations have been vigorously supportive of Ukraine in part because they worry about being the next victim of an empowered Russia.
At the opening of the meeting, Czech Republic President Petr Pavel broadly urged the military chiefs gathered in the room to be ”bold and open in articulating your assessments and recommendations. The rounder and the softer they are, the less they will be understood by the political level.”
The allies, he said, must “take the right steps and the right decisions to protect our countries and our way of life.”
The military leaders routinely develop plans and recommendations that are then sent to the civilian NATO defense secretaries for discussion and then on to the nations’ leaders in the alliance.
The U.S. allows Ukraine to use American-provided weapons in cross-border strikes to counter attacks by Russian forces. But it doesn’t allow Kyiv to fire long-range missiles, such as the ATACMS, deep into Russia. The U.S. has argued that Ukraine has drones that can strike far and should use ATACMS judiciously because they only have a limited number.
Ukraine has increased its pleas with Washington to lift the restrictions, particularly as winter looms and Kyiv worries about Russian gains during the colder months.
“You want to weaken the enemy that attacks you in order to not only fight the arrows that come your way, but also attack the archer that is, as we see, very often operating from Russia proper into Ukraine,” said Bauer. “So militarily, there’s a good reason to do that, to weaken the enemy, to weaken its logistic lines, fuel, ammunition that comes to the front. That is what you want to stop, if at all possible.”
Brown, for his part, told reporters traveling with him to the meeting that the U.S. policy on long-range weapons remains in place.
But, he added, “by the same token, what we want to do is — regardless of that policy — we want to continue to make Ukraine successful with the capabilities that have been provided” by the U.S. and other nations in the coalition, as well as the weapons Kyiv has been able to build itself.
“They’ve proven themselves fairly effective in building out uncrewed aerial vehicles, in building out drones,” Brown told reporters traveling with him to meetings in Europe.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has made similar points, arguing that one weapons system won’t determine success in the war.
“There are a number of things that go into the overall equation as to whether or not you know you want to provide one capability or another,” Austin said Friday. “There is no silver bullet when it comes to things like this.”
He also noted that Ukraine has already been able to strike inside Russia with its own internally produced systems, including drones.
The end of Russia’s war in Ukraine could come from an unexpected direction.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he wants Ukraine’s proposal to end the war ready to be presented to the Russian government by the end of this year.
On June 16, during the Swiss Peace Formula Summit, the Ukrainian president stated that the next and final summit with his allies should be held in “months, not years”.
This second meeting should produce a document which will be then presented to Moscow and President Vladimir Putin by the so-called “third countries” on behalf of Kyiv.
But who would those third countries be? And what is Russia’s stance on Zelenskyy’s peace formula?
‘Russia’s long-term goal is to disband Western unity’
The US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said Kremlin officials are likely trying to shape international peace mediation efforts in the war in Ukraine while demonstrating Russia’s unwillingness to engage in good-faith negotiations with Kyiv.
Moscow repeatedly stated that Russia has never seriously considered the plan, calling Zelenskyy’s peace formula an “ultimatum”.
Yet, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov attended the Russia–Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Joint Ministerial Meeting of Strategic Dialogue in Saudi Arabia on 9 September, likely as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to advance the creation of its envisioned “Eurasian security architecture”.
The ISW previously assessed that Moscow’s proposal of Eurasian security architecture is consistent with Russia’s long-term strategic goal of disbanding Western unity, disbanding NATO from within, and destroying the current world order.
In Saudi Arabia, Lavrov met with his counterparts from Brazil and India, countries often mentioned as those who could play an important part in ending the war in Ukraine.
Global North vs Global South?
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 has emphasised the division between the so-called Global North and Global South.
The Global North states—the term usually used to describe the world’s most developed nations—have all been staunch supporters of Ukraine. The US, UK, and EU have all displayed their solid commitment to weapons and equipment supplies, financial aid, and, in general, their political support for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia.
This is why they are not the leading candidates to mediate any possible talks. Not because they don’t want to or because Ukraine doesn’t want it, but because most of them are now in a complex, open conflict with Russia. Moscow has even included them on its “unfriendly countries list”.
This is why any possible mediation or passing of the peace formula paper could hypothetically be trusted with the so-called Global South.
Many of the Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Latin American states didn’t condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since the first days of the all-out war, and this is what made them priorities for Zelenskyy and his diplomatic team.
For many years, these countries had been somehow pushed into Russia’s area of interest. And now their position and diplomatic weight is more significant than ever.
Who are the possible key players?
India: When Russia launched a barrage of missiles across Ukraine on 8 July and destroyed the largest children’s hospital in Kyiv, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was visiting Moscow.
As the photos emerged of cancer-stricken children being evacuated and receiving their vital treatment in the dusty street among the rescue operations at Ohmatdyt in Kyiv, Moscow released pictures of Modi shaking hands with Putin.
The timing of his Moscow visit didn’t go unnoticed in Kyiv, and when Modi arrived in the Ukrainian capital a few weeks later for his historic visit, he joined Zelenskyy in commemorating hundreds of Ukrainian children who have been killed during more than two years of war.
Modi, who told Zelenskyy that the killing of children in conflict was not acceptable, said he had come to Ukraine with a message of peace. He stated his respect for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, but overall Modi’s peace rhetoric was largely unchanged from the message he had delivered weeks earlier in Moscow as he reiterated that the conflict can be resolved only through dialogue and diplomacy.
Middle East: specifically Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Saudi Arabia hosted an international summit on the peace formula in August of last year.
The country has also played an important role in negotiating prisoner exchanges with Russia, allowing Ukraine to achieve a major exchange involving nearly 300 people in September 2022, including the high-profile commanding officers who defended the Azovstal plant in Mariupol.
UAE also succeeded in meditating an exchange of POW’s when Kyiv and Moscow each returned 90 prisoners of war.
Qatar mediated one of the most tragic and most complicated issues amid the full-scale invasion — the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. Russia has forcefully deported over 19,000 children from Ukraine. Fewer than 400 have been returned.
Don’t look too far
When Zelenskyy visited Italy last week for the Ambrosetti Forum, his office said Ukraine’s president planned to meet with Italian authorities and representatives of Italian businesses.
It is unclear whether he met Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev who also attended the forum in Cernobbio and delivered a speech titled “Azerbaijan’s role in the new geopolitical environment”.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine arguably made Azerbaijan more important than ever to the Western partners, as Europe needs both the country’s energy resources and its transit routes.
Aliyev said that Baku was “approached by Russia, Ukraine and European institutions in order to facilitate the continuation of the gas transit through Ukraine.”
Aliyev made a surprising statement by announcing for the first time that Azerbaijan is now getting involved in helping to look for a solution to end the war in Ukraine as his country has strong positive relations and the trust of both Ukraine and Russia.
The Azerbaijan president said, “We have certain optimism because in recent contexts with both countries, we think there is ground for a breakthrough. Probably, it may be premature for me to go into too much detail, but if it works, then we may be able to do other things in order to help put an end to this war, which is destroying the whole region.”
He also emphasised that Azerbaijan “strongly supports Ukraine’s and all countries’ territorial integrity and sovereignty,” which has been the country’s position since the beginning of the war, while in parallel, Azerbaijan continues to have strong relations with Russia.
Two weeks before Aliyev’s participation in the Ambrosetti Forum alongside Zelenskyy, he welcomed Putin in Baku.
Unimaginable peace opens the door to ending war in Ukraine
For decades, Moscow has considered Azerbaijan and Armenia to be in its sphere of influence. But this long-standing status quo was shattered when Azerbaijan retook control of the Karabakh region in a lightning offensive in September 2023 while Russia was bogged down in Ukraine, triggering a major political reshape of the region.
A traditional ally and partner of Moscow, Armenia saw the historic departure of Russian border guards from its Zvartnots Airport this summer, 32 years after their deployment began.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said the move was causing “irreparable damage” to relations between the two countries. But this damage appeared to be even more significant and evolving as Armenia blamed Russia for its defeat in Karabakh region.
A month later, Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan announced that Yerevan had suspended its participation in the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) — Russia’s answer to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which includes Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Instead, to Russia’s dismay, Armenia has started improving relations with the West. European Commission Vice President and EU Commissioner for Promoting the European Way of Life Margaritis Schinas visited Yerevan on 9 September as the EU and Yerevan launched a dialogue on visa liberalisation for Armenia.
On X, formerly known as Twitter, Schinas said his visit marked the “recent successes in the partnership’ and specifically mentioned ‘security support’ as one of the key aspects of it, stating that ‘The EU stands shoulder to shoulder with Armenia.”
Yerevan and Baku have been negotiating a groundbreaking and regionally stabilising peace treaty after decades of war over Karabakh region and Ukraine issued a statement in April, welcoming the agreements between the two countries on finding solutions to the interstate border.
The Ukrainian ministry stressed that the delimitation of the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia based on respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity “is a necessary condition for normalising relations between the countries and ensuring stability and security in the region.
Aliyev’s surprise announcement last week on seeking solutions and signalling an involvement in the peace negotiations as an intermediary between Russia and Ukraine, while negotiating its own peace with Armenia, would further reshape the balance of powers and stability in the whole region and beyond.
As the once unimaginable peace is now looming between Azerbaijan and Armenia, this historic moment in the Caucasus could also hold the right pieces and keys to the difficult solution for ending the war in Ukraine.
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