Politico

During a private White House meeting on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell nudged House Speaker Mike Johnson to take up the Senate’s $95 billion foreign aid bill — a move that would risk a right-flank rebellion against the speaker.

The Senate GOP leader’s public and private remarks on Tuesday advocating for his chamber’s bill was a subtle but notable shift from his tactics just two weeks ago, when the Kentuckian said he didn’t “have any advice” for the speaker on how to handle President Joe Biden’s long-stalled request for new Ukraine aid. Earlier this month, McConnell even suggested potential negotiations to reconcile different House and Senate aid bills.

But after more than an hour at the White House, Johnson was on an island when it came to Ukraine, compared to Biden and his fellow three top leaders.

“What I hope is that the House will take up the Senate bill and let the House work its way. If they change it and send it back here, we have further delays,” McConnell said on Tuesday afternoon. “We don’t want the Russians to win in Ukraine. So, we have a time problem here. And I think the best way to move quickly and get the bill to the president would be for the House to take up the Senate bill and pass it.”

He similarly advocated for the Senate’s legislation in the private meeting, according to two people familiar with the sitdown.

McConnell’s move underscored that the two men are dealing in dramatically disparate ways with similar pressures they face from conservatives who have no interest in passing Ukraine aid. While McConnell is sensitive to Johnson’s tough position, their young relationship is different from his partnership with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who got broad deference from McConnell during last year’s debt ceiling negotiations.

Nonetheless, Tuesday’s meeting showcased Johnson’s isolation among congressional leaders. And while standing apart from the Senate is not an unpopular position in the raucous House GOP, it complicates Johnson’s stewardship of the chamber given the number of policy, political and tactical differences that congressional Republicans face in a crucial election year.

While McConnell, 82, views the fight for Ukraine aid as crucial to his 40-year Senate legacy, Johnson is roughly five months into a shock ascension as speaker and already facing heavy turbulence from his own members. Even Democrats are sympathetic to Johnson’s ever-present threat of an ouster if conservatives decide to force a vote of no confidence in his speakership.

McConnell faces his fair share of criticisms from his rank and file, but at least he knows his conservative foes likely have to wait until November’s leadership elections to air them formally.

“I don’t know how many political lives he has,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said of the speaker. “But I think it’s really important that we get [Ukraine] done.”

Cornyn suggested Johnson could add a hardline border security bill to the Ukraine legislation, and he didn’t go as far as McConnell in advising Johnson to simply pass the Senate bill. That “is easy for senators to say,” Cornyn said, adding that Johnson is “trying to figure it out and I wish him well.”

Johnson faced a near-pile-on from top Democrats in the room on Tuesday, including Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — all of whom pushed for Ukraine as well. Schumer publicly noted that “McConnell was the lead speaker in saying we needed to do Ukraine” during the meeting, describing it as among the most “intense” discussions in the room.

“It was the consensus in that room Zelenskyy and Ukraine will lose the war” if the U.S. does not provide aid, Schumer also warned.

While all four top leaders are now in apparent lockstep about avoiding a government shutdown, Johnson remained noncommittal on an emergency foreign aid bill, simply stating that lawmakers must prioritize the U.S. border before helping an ally overseas. He is pushing Biden to use executive actions to tighten security on the southern border before turning to Ukraine, and he is not alone in that view.

“That would be the way it would work if we did it, if the president would do those executive actions,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who aligns with Johnson on the border.

Johnson has previously pledged to get aid to Ukraine passed. But since then he has heard loud warnings from conservatives such as Reps. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — including threats of a vote to oust him as speaker — if he moves forward on such aid.

Ultimately, Johnson could watch a group of his own centrists solve the problem without him. Several Republicans are still open to joining hands with Democrats to bypass the constrained speaker and pass a separate Ukraine-border bill.

McConnell, meanwhile, has taken arrows for pushing forward on a border and foreign aid package that includes funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) even called for the Kentucky Republican to step down over the matter earlier this month, and conservative blanched at McConnell’s Ukraine advocacy on Tuesday.

“Who was standing up for the American taxpayer? Or for Americans harmed by Biden’s open-border policies?” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) in reaction to the meeting.

There’s more daylight on the GOP’s funding strategy between Johnson and McConnell, who said Monday that Congress needs to go “toward clean appropriations and away from poison pills.” Johnson and his House allies are fighting for conservative policy restrictions in spending bills, which Democrats say they will not accept.

The first chance of a partial shutdown hits this week with Friday’s funding deadline. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who is close to Johnson, said he was unsure whether the speaker could muscle through a stopgap “continuing resolution” to avoid a funding lapse — though it appears to be the only way around a shutdown.

“I don’t see a lot of coordination,” Kennedy said of House and Senate Republicans. “We could just keep doing these short-term [continuing resolutions] between now and the election.”

Johnson has pledged to honor the so-called 72-hour rule and give his members time to review any deal that is secured. That leaves very little time to stop a group of government agencies from running out of money on Saturday.

He also pledged to keep trying to pass all 12 individual spending bills, which has set the expectation that Johnson will keep pushing the same type of stopgap spending patches he has promised to avoid.

Finger-pointing between Schumer and Johnson is already underway as to who would shoulder the blame in the event of a shutdown. Importantly, though, Republicans have failed to leverage shutdowns to get their demanded concessions over the last three decades.

That includes former Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995 trying to unsuccessfully use a partial shutdown to get cuts from then-President Bill Clinton. More recently, former President Donald Trump failed to extract money for his border wall in 2018 after a shutdown dragged on for a record 35 days.

“It’s just a road to nowhere at midnight,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) of a shutdown. “A misery march. Nobody wins.”

Joe Biden’s campaign has elevated Alana Mounce to serve as its political director, along with bringing on board two other senior hires, according to two people familiar with the decision.

Mounce, who has been serving as the Biden campaign’s ballot access director, will take on the critical role of helping chart out an increasingly challenging reelection campaign. Prior to her current job, she served as Biden’s 2020 Nevada state director and was the executive director of the state Democratic Party before becoming political director at the Democratic National Committee.

The Biden campaign also said that Roohi Rustum will serve as national organizing director and Meredith Horton will be the national director for voter protection and access. Roohi joins the campaign from the Democratic National Committee, where she served as the national organizing director. Horton is the founder and president of the consulting firm MPH Concepts and previously worked on voter protection for the Georgia Democratic Party.

The hires are further illustration of the reelection campaign staffing up in haste after spending the fall and early winter with a relatively small footprint. They also provide an indication of the states the campaign is prioritizing.

In particular, Mounce’s elevation to political director underscores the central role that Nevada — and Latino voters, who make up about 20 percent of the state’s electorate — will play in Biden’s reelection effort.

Latino voters are expected to make up a larger percentage of eligible U.S. voters this election year compared to 2020. According to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, 36.2 million are eligible to vote this year, up from 32.3 million in 2020 — an 14 percent increase.

But the Biden campaign has its work cut out. Polls show that Latino voters have slowly been drifting away from the party and towards Republicans. Biden won Hispanic voters by 21 points in 2020 — 59 percent to 38 percent — which was down significantly from Clinton’s 38-point advantage over Donald Trump in 2016.

Mounce’s move is also the latest sign that the Biden campaign is rounding out its team as it gears up for what is all but certain to be a tough rematch against Trump. Top White House advisers Jen O’Malley Dillon and Mike Donilon left the West Wing to join the campaign earlier this year and the campaign has made a number of other recent hires to its national staff.

President Joe Biden’s Monday afternoon taping of NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” drew a crowd of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, the latest instance of progressive pushback against his administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.

The group Jewish Voice for Peace NYC posted pictures of the protesters on social media. Some wore shirts saying, “cease fire now,” while holding a banner with the words “Jews to Biden: Stop Arming Genocide.”

“Hundreds of Jews and allies are taking over NBC’s famed 30 Rockefeller Center headquarters in NYC to disrupt President Biden’s appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers. @POTUS deadly foreign policy has funded and armed genocide in Gaza,” the group wrote.

A later post claimed that “50 Jewish” protesters were arrested while calling on Biden to stop supporting the Israeli government and its military operations in Gaza, which the group described as “genocide” against Palestinians.

Biden’s late-night talk show appearance, alongside fellow guest Amy Poehler, was taped to air Tuesday after midnight, according to a White House pool report.

Republicans are renewing their calls for stricter immigration rules following the death of University of Georgia student Laken Hope Riley after reports that the suspect in her murder entered the U.S. illegally from Venezuela.

Former President Donald Trump said in a social media post Monday that if he’s voted back into the White House later this year, he would “immediately seal the border, seal the border, stop the invasion and, on day one, we will begin the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals in American history.”

“Crooked Joe Biden’s Border INVASION is destroying our country and killing our citizens,” Trump said in the post. “The horrible murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley at the University of Georgia should have NEVER happened! The monster who took her life illegally entered our Country in 2022…and then was released AGAIN by Radical Democrats in New York after injuring a CHILD!!”

Riley, 22, was found dead Thursday after jogging near a lake on UGA’s campus. Riley died from blunt force trauma. On Friday, the suspect in her killing, Jose Antonio Ibarra, was charged with felony murder, false imprisonment and kidnapping and concealing the death of another.

Ibarra was arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in September 2022 after he unlawfully entered the U.S. near El Paso, Texas.

Several congressional Republicans are also calling for stricter border security amid the death of Riley, citing a connection between immigration and crime — though there is little evidence to suggest such a link. The calls for increased border security come after congressional Republicans killed a bipartisan border deal in the Senate earlier this month.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a post on social media Saturday that Biden needed to “close the border” in light of Riley’s death.

“The brutal murderer who took the life of Laken was one of the millions of illegal aliens that the Biden Administration simply released and unleashed upon our country,” Johnson said. “For Laken, and the countless many others lost to this border catastrophe, House Republicans will continue to fight tooth and nail for a return to law and order.”

Riley’s death and the resulting renewed urgency for tighter border measures mirror the fallout from 2018’s slaying of 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts, an Iowan killed by an undocumented immigrant.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp shared a letter addressed to President Joe Biden on Saturday slamming the Democrat’s “failed policies” on the border.

“Laken Riley’s tragic death struck the hearts of Georgians everywhere and has sparked national outrage,” Kemp said in a post on X. “Joe Biden’s failed policies have turned every state into a border state, and I’m demanding information from him so we can protect our people when the federal government won’t!”

President Joe Biden will travel Thursday to Brownsville, Texas, to meet with U.S. Border Patrol agents, law enforcement, and local leaders, a White House official confirmed Monday morning.

The visit will coincide with one scheduled the same day by former President Donald Trump — the presumptive GOP presidential nominee — whose plans to travel to Eagle Pass, Texas, were made public last week.

Biden’s visit underscores the recent shift in his stance on the border. After largely ignoring the GOP clamor over migration and border security during his first few years in the White House, Biden now appears increasingly eager to lean in on the issue — to shift from a defensive posture to an offensive one after congressional Republicans blocked a bipartisan compromise, which the president supported, that would have directed new funding to border agents and tightened asylum policies.

According to the White House official, Biden on his visit Thursday “will discuss the urgent need to pass the Senate bipartisan border security agreement, the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border in decades.”

“He will reiterate his calls for Congressional Republicans to stop playing politics and to provide the funding needed for additional U.S. Border Patrol agents, more asylum officers, fentanyl detection technology and more,” the official continued.

News of Biden’s border visit was first reported by the New York Times.

President Joe Biden implored governors to press their federal representatives to revive the bipartisan border deal that collapsed in Congress.

Republicans are rejecting his plea.

“The sales pitch was made,” North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum said the next day at the National Governors Association’s winter conference. “I’m not sure any minds were changed.”

Biden told a bipartisan group of governors at the White House on Friday that he’s exploring what executive actions he can take to curb crossings at the southern border but that he’s running into potential legal roadblocks.

He also pressed governors to pressure their congressional delegations to resurrect the border bill that a bipartisan group of senators spent months negotiating only for it to implode within 48 hours of its release. And he criticized Republicans for tanking the deal amid opposition to it from former President Donald Trump.

Democratic governors quickly heeded Biden’s call.

“I hope that Republicans join Democrats in taking the border security seriously and saying let’s secure the border and control the flow of immigration, rather than have the chaos that we have now,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, whose state has been grappling with an influx of migrants to Denver, said in a brief interview at the NGA meeting.

“There’s an opportunity to call on Congress to take action,” he said.

But Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, who was among the dozen-plus Republican governors who visited the border crossing at Eagle Pass, Texas, earlier this month to criticize Biden’s handling of immigration issues, reiterated his argument that the border could be controlled through executive action.

“I was very disappointed in the meeting” with Biden and administration officials at the White House, Gianforte told reporters on Saturday. “There are many things that President Biden could do to secure the border and he’s refusing to act.”

Gianforte said he presented Biden with a copy of the 10-point border security plan that Republicans first submitted to his administration over two years ago. It called, among other things, to end catch and release.

Biden, Gianforte said, never responded to the initial letter. On Friday “he said he would read it,” Gianforte said, noting that he would take Biden at his word.

He added: “Joe Biden needs to do his job.”

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, piled on in a “Fox News Sunday” interview, calling on Biden to reinstate the “remain in Mexico policy,” a Trump-era program that requires asylum seekers to stay in that country while awaiting a hearing.

“Really, we heard just a few excuses,” Stitt said.

Biden did not specify to governors what executive actions he was looking to take, said Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican who chairs the National Governors Association. Cox told reporters that the president was “working with his attorneys, trying to understand what executive action would be upheld in the courts and would be constitutional.”

The president, Cox said, “seemed a little frustrated that he was not getting answers from attorneys that he felt he could take the kind of actions that he wanted to.”

POLITICO previously reported that ideas the Biden administration is discussing include using a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act to bar migrants from seeking asylum in between U.S. ports of entry and tying that directive to a certain number of illegal crossings.

Cox said “there is more that the president can do on the border” to enforce the laws already on the books.

Despite pushing for the president to take executive action on the border, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he wouldn’t support Biden’s proposal to restrict migrants’ ability to seek asylum after illegally crossing the border.

“No. Because if he were to grant asylum after migrants crossed the border illegally, that would be authorizing illegal immigration and that would cause chaos,” Abbott said during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He went on to echo Cox’s call for Biden to better enforce existing immigration laws.

Meanwhile, Idaho Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, cast doubt in a brief interview at NGA that Biden would be able to reduce the timeline for asylum cases to months instead of years — as he hopes to do by granting asylum officers new authority — without adding more immigration judges.

Even as Republican governors publicly fell back on partisan calls for Biden to take executive action to ease the border crisis, Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, insisted to reporters that behind the White House’s closed doors there were “both Democrats and Republicans that want a solution and that don’t think that Congress can simply sit on the sidelines.”

Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, said if he was running as a Republican in a state where federal lawmakers wouldn’t vote for the border bill, “I would be nervous, because we’re going to beat the hell out of them for not doing this, because these are the fixes — and they don’t deny these are the fixes.”

Walz, at a roundtable hosted by the Democratic Governors Association, recounted how he had asked Republican governors at the White House meeting who would support the bill and what parts of it they disagreed with.

“There was no answer,” he said.

Still, Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper expressed hope that the legislation could still pass.

“We’ve seen a lot of big legislation over the decades sometimes spring back to life,” Cooper told reporters. “If Republican and Democratic governors got together and said this legislation is important for our national security and for people living in our states, it would be a powerful thing.”

Zach Montellaro and Kelly Garrity contributed to this report.

There’s no deal yet on a potential Gaza cease-fire and hostage swap, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday.

“I’m not sure of the exact duration [of a cease-fire], but I can tell you we’re all working on it, he said on CBS’ “Face The Nation” of ongoing talks between the U.S., Israel, Egypt and Qatar.

“We want it. I want it. We want to liberate the remaining hostages. We’ve already brought half of them back and I appreciate the combined effort of Israel and the United States to bring back the remaining hostages. I can’t tell you if we’ll have it,” he added.

The draft deal includes the release of up to 40 women and older hostages held in Gaza in return for up to 300 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, mostly women, minors and older people, according to a senior Egyptian official, the Associated Press reported.

The proposed six-week pause in fighting would allow hundreds of aid trucks to enter Gaza every day, including the northern half of the besieged territory, the AP reported. Negotiators face an unofficial deadline of the start of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan around March 10.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that the four Middle East nations came to “an understanding” on what the “basic contours” of a hostage deal and temporary cease-fire would look like, without discussing specifics.

“There will have to be indirect discussions by Qatar and Egypt with Hamas because ultimately they will have to agree to release the hostages. That work is underway,” he added.

Israeli officials met Saturday night after the latest round of talks. Netanyahu on Sunday called Hamas’ initial negotiating demands “crazy” and pledged “total victory” over the militant group in Gaza.

“You can’t have victory until you eliminate Hamas,” Netanyahu said, adding that likely expanded operations in the southern Gaza city of Rafah are “weeks, not months” away from completion. “If we have a deal it will be delayed somewhat, but … if we don’t have a deal we’ll do it anyway,” he said.

Sullivan said earlier on NBC’s “Meet The Press” that President Joe Biden has not been briefed on Israel’s Rafah plan. But he added: “We’ve been clear that we do not believe that an operation — a major military operation — should proceed in Rafah, unless there is a clear and executable plan to protect those civilians, to get them to safety and feed, clothe and house them, and we have not seen a plan like that.”

Netanyahu, meanwhile, insisted that Israel and the US were “on the same page” on a plan to evacuate Rafah’s Palestinian citizens and destroy Hamas’ remaining presence there.

The prime minister was bullish on the operation’s prospects. “A lot of things that we were told by the best of friends initially, turned out not to be. They said you can’t enter the ground war without having enormous complications. They said you can’t enter Gaza City, can’t go into the tunnels. It will be a blood bath. All of that turned out to be not true.”

Since the start of the war, precipitated by Hamas’ Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel that left more than 1,150 dead, some 29,514 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive and close to 70,000 have been wounded, the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Friday. Two-thirds of those killed have been women and children, said the ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count.

Israel says it has killed at least 10,000 Hamas fighters, without providing evidence for its count, according to the AP.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday pushed back on concerns over Joe Biden’s age by arguing that the president’s age and experience are among the top reasons why he should be elected to a second term.

“I’ve seen him up close, I’ve seen him from afar, but here’s my point: It’s because of his age that he’s been so successful,” Newsom said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.

He pointed to the raft of sweeping legislation signed by Biden, including bills that passed with the support of Republicans. “So the opportunity to express that for four more years, what a gift it is for the American people. And as a Democrat, what a gift it is for me to make the case for the leader of our party, Joe Biden.”

As a top Biden-Harris campaign surrogate, the 56-year-old Newsom often faces questions from the media about Biden’s fitness, as well as his own White House ambitions. He has gushed excessively about the president’s devotion to the country and capacity for empathy and declared himself “mesmerized” by the “masterclass” Biden has put on in Washington.

Still, Newsom was asked in the interview that aired Sunday whether the 81-year-old president needs to do more in public to demonstrate his forcefulness and command.

“I think he’s doing everything he needs to do,” he said. “I mean, he’s got an extraordinary record. He’s doing everything he needs to do on Ukraine at the moment. He’s doing everything he needs to do to reconcile and wrestle some common sense as it relates to a bipartisan approach to address the issue of the border where the Republicans couldn’t take ‘yes’ for an answer because they don’t want to make that a political issue,” he said. “He is leading.”

Newsom also dismissed queries about his own presidential prospects in 2024 and whether he’s gotten calls from anxious donors focused on a Plan B to Biden. He repeated that he’s bored with such questions and that he doesn’t believe there’s a need for them.

“It’s all idle chatter. You know what? That’s a sideshow. I think what Democrats need to do is worry less, do more, continue to over-perform as we have, continue to win, make the case,” Newsom said.

He said merely engaging in the question about him or somebody else running is a boon to Republicans. GOP officials and conservative media figures for months have speculated about not only Newsom but also Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton.

“It’s a damning conversation, frankly, the other side wants us to have. And trust me, I know the mishegoss coming from the other side. I’m deeply mindful of the anger machine and all the entertainment industry out there on Fox and elsewhere,” said Newsom, a regular consumer of conservative media.

“They love ginning this stuff up. At the end of the day, not only has this train left the station, but we get to enjoy a record of accomplishment as we make the case in a reelection, the likes of which we couldn’t even have dreamt of even as a Democrat last century.”

Ukraine can still win the war against Russia, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said a day after the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion — but first, Congress needs to act.

“Of course Ukraine can win. Of course Ukraine has already succeeded militarily in one of the most profound objectives it had, which was to keep the country from falling into Russian hands,” Sullivan said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” broadcast Sunday.

But Ukraine can only do so “if it has the tools that it needs. And that is why the United States needs to deliver the aid package that passed on a massive bipartisan vote in the Senate — the House needs to step up and pass that,” Sullivan added.

The Senate advanced a package earlier this month that would have delivered about $60 billion to Ukraine, which recently had to pull its forces back from the key city of Avdiivka. But the House broke for a two-week recess without passing the aid package.

“We are looking at some setbacks, including in recent days, because Ukraine didn’t have enough ammunition to defend the town of Avdiivka in the East. But at the end of the day, Ukraine still has the capacity if we provide them the tools and resources they need to be able to prevail in this war,” Sullivan said.

“[It] is up to us, the United States and our allies and partners, to deliver on our commitments,” Sullivan added.

President Joe Biden met Thursday with the widow and daughter of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in prison last week.

In San Francisco as part of a three-day fundraising swing through California, Biden expressed his “heartfelt condolences” to Yulia and Dasha Navalny, according to a White House readout of the meeting.

Biden “expressed his admiration for Aleksey Navalny’s extraordinary courage and his legacy of fighting against corruption and for a free and democratic Russia in which the rule of law applies equally to everyone,” the White House said. “The President emphasized that Aleksey’s legacy will carry on through people across Russia and around the world mourning his loss and fighting for freedom, democracy, and human rights.”

Biden also posted a message on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, with photos of him with the Navalny family.

Few details have emerged about the cause of Navalny’s death — his family has been unable to retrieve his body — but Biden and most Russia-watchers have expressed suspicion, if not near certainty, that Vladimir Putin had a direct role after the Russian president moved the dissident last year to a remote penal colony above the Arctic Circle.

Yulia, in a video message, blamed Putin for killing her husband and vowed to take up his cause, that of a free Russia.

Biden, who last week said Putin is “responsible” for the death, said in 2021 that the Russian leader would suffer “devastating” consequences if Navalny were to die in prison.

Asked about that remark following Navalny’s death, Biden seemed to dismiss the threat as irrelevant some three years later. He noted that Russia has already suffered major consequences following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine due to the economic sanctions and export controls that have been imposed by the U.S. and NATO allies.

The White House, in its readout of Thursday’s meeting, also noted that Biden planned to announce additional sanctions on Friday “in response to Aleksey’s death, Russia’s repression and aggression, and its brutal and illegal war in Ukraine.”

But that package had been in the works prior to Navalny’s death, planned for release to mark the two-year anniversary of the war this Saturday. And adding additional measures to it following Navalny’s death has proved complicated, according to three administration officials.