Politico

MUNICH — Vice President Kamala Harris blamed the Kremlin for Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s reported death Friday, hinting at a strong American response in the days ahead.

“Whatever story they tell, let us be clear, Russia is responsible,” Harris said during a speech at the Munich Security Conference, adding the Biden administration would have more to say about its response soon. The vice president noted that the United States had yet to confirm the news, but if it’s true, “this would be a further sign of Putin’s brutality.”

Harris was not specific about what the U.S. would do: “We will have more to say on this later.”

Navalny, the longtime political opponent to Russian President Vladimir Putin, died in prison Friday, according to Russia’s federal prison service. While the prison service said he collapsed during a walk, there was immediate speculation that Putin had a hand in his death. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “it’s obvious” that Putin killed him.

At Munich, news of Navalny’s death spread through the Bayerischer Hof hotel, leading to gasps and a blip of silence. Cramped hallways filled with talk about the passing of the staunch Vladimir Putin critic, with some attendees suggesting the Kremlin timed it to the conference.

Eyes on are the Biden administration in part because the U.S. president has previously made strong statements about Russia’s treatment of him. After President Joe Biden met with Putin in 2021, he was asked what would happen if Navalny were to die in Russian custody. Biden said that in his discussions with Putin, “I made it clear to him that I believe the consequences of that would be devastating for Russia.”

The 44 American lawmakers in the Bavarian capital were similarly critical of the Russian leader.

“It confirms what we already knew about Vladimir Putin that he is a murderer,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who leads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Europe panel. “He is committing crimes against humanity, and he clearly engineered the death of his most well-known opponent.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), also a SFRC member, said that “the great heroes of freedom and liberty never really die. They become martyrs and symbols that often become more powerful in death than in life.”

“It’s likely that Putin and his stooges will rue the day they locked Navalny away to die,” Murphy added.

The following article first appeared in West Wing Playbook.

As Senate Democrats tried to revive President Joe Biden’s request for billions of dollars in foreign aid last month, national security adviser Jake Sullivan put in a call to Sen. Chris Van Hollen.

The Maryland Democrat and a dozen progressive colleagues had recently gone public with an amendment to require that any country receiving U.S. weapons comply with humanitarian laws. That effort threatened to produce a messy intraparty debate over whether Biden should be doing more to encourage Israel to protect Palestinian civilians as it fights Hamas.

But Sullivan wasn’t calling to complain. To Van Hollen’s surprise, the administration was open to converting the amendment — which would have applied only to new funding — into a memo with the force of law, meaning it would apply to all U.S. military aid and stay in effect even if the president’s supplemental bill didn’t make it through the House.

Biden issued the order last week and it won the approval of most Senate progressives. The chamber passed the supplemental on Tuesday.

“There’s no requirement right now that if you want to receive American weapons, you have to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance in conflict zones where those weapons are being used,” said Van Hollen. He called the new policy “a very important tool to both pressure recipient countries but also to pressure the Biden administration to take action to insist on what the [policy’s] promise requires.”

White House officials have stressed that the directive didn’t impose new standards for military aid and that the administration had already been following the underlying policy. NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watson said the directive was not being issued because the administration believed a country was violating the standards. “If we did, you’d have heard about it long ago — and seen the consequences,” she said.

But the fact that Biden took the step still underscores what type of political pressures he responds to. For months, the White House has been under an intense public barrage to more fully address humanitarian issues in Gaza and Israel’s aggressive conduct of the war.

The administration responded by publicly calling for more aid to be sent into Gaza and with a more fulsome pushback to proposed military operations. On Wednesday, it announced it was expanding an executive authority to temporarily shield certain Palestinians in the U.S. from deportation.

But in this case, it was the inside game — including private pleas from senators, legislative horsetrading and the concern over a high-profile failed vote — that moved the president’s hand.

Early conversations between lawmakers and the administration began in December. But they got more serious in January, when Van Hollen and his progressive colleagues huddled with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, telling him they would insist on a vote to ensure military aid recipients complied with humanitarian laws. Their message was clear: If the bill made it to the floor, the Democrats could block the tens of billions of dollars the president had requested for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.

Schumer told several people at the White House, including Sullivan, that they needed to talk with the lawmakers, according to a person familiar with the situation who was granted anonymity to relay private conversations.

Over the course of several phone calls and meetings — Van Hollen’s staff counted up 11 hours of wordsmithing between the senator and NSC — the policy was drafted.

The policy requires that before the U.S. hands over weapons and military assistance to another country, the recipient provides written assurance that it will comply with humanitarian law, as well as facilitate U.S. humanitarian assistance in areas of conflict. It also requires the administration to provide Congress detailed reports on whether these countries are adhering to the requirements. If a country violates its assurances, the president can choose to take action up to suspending further deliveries.

The administration viewed the amendment demand and the public attention on the issue as an opportunity to be more clear and transparent that they hold recipient countries to these standards, according to an administration official granted anonymity to discuss the thinking behind writing the memo.

While the desire to ensure passage of the national security supplemental played a major role in Biden issuing the directive, other lawmakers said that the president’s own frustration with the situation in Gaza factored in, too. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who backed the amendment push, said the White House “has not been happy” with the pace of humanitarian aid into the region and that the directive allowed them an opportunity to formalize it.

“I think there was an increasing sense of disquiet within the White House national security team about ‘we’re fully in to help Israel defend itself against Hamas, but this is not just supposed to be a war against Palestinians,’” Kaine said. “The White House, more than the politics, may share the same concern and even frustration and felt like an amendment of this kind would give them a way to address their frustration.”

The policy doesn’t require aid to be shut off if countries don’t comply. Biden will merely have the option to do it — a step short of the mandatory compliance that lawmakers such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) demanded. Human rights advocates have traditionally pushed for strong enforcement mechanisms that would force the hand of an administration reluctant to take dramatic action.

But Van Hollen, Kaine and others insist that the reporting requirements will make it harder for the executive branch to look away.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a longtime advocate of conditioning aid to Israel, called the reporting requirements a “sea change” in terms of how the government approaches “U.S. military aid and its impact on civilians, both because of how explicit it is in describing what the responsibilities are, and how we actually put metrics in that we can see.”

The policy demands that the administration analyze whether a recipient of U.S. aid has used the weapons in line with best practices to avoid civilian harm. The reporting requirements will be backdated to January 2023, allowing the report to cover the war in Gaza.

“I’ve been urging the president all along to make more and more use of the tools that are already available. And now that we have this national security memorandum, we’ve provided the President with a whole additional toolbox,” Van Hollen said. “It’s a big toolbox. He’s really going to have to use it.”

Like this content? Consider signing up for POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook newsletter.

That President Joe Biden now presents as “an elderly man with a poor memory,” as special counsel Robert Hur put it in his recent report, is something quite obvious to anyone watching the president on those rare occasions when White House handlers unleash him from his script. That Biden’s gears no longer perfectly mesh would seem to matter, given his campaign for another four years in office. The findings, from Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents, would also seem to be newsworthy.

But many critics of the press, both the professionals and the partisans, have denounced the stream of stories exploring this episode. Former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan found the coverage of this news, specifically in her old Times haunt, completely overcooked.

At the risk of staging an intramural wrestling match of one press critic against another, allow me to respectfully explain why Sullivan is wrong. If the Times is guilty of anything, it is of being late to the subject of Biden’s marbles. Instead of brickbatting the paper for its coverage, the paper deserves a small bouquet and an attaboy for scrutinizing the president’s underscrutinized capabilities.

Sullivan surrenders a pawn in her Substack piece by conceding that Biden’s age makes him less than an ideal candidate for a second presidential term, and another one when she acknowledges that he’s “never” been “a gifted public speaker” (talk about understatement), and still another when she says he “makes cringe-inducing mistakes.” She observes that his age “really is a legitimate concern for many voters.”

But having noted her presentation against Biden, she shifts to explain that the press should lighten up on the president because “Trump is poised to take down American democracy, starting on Day One.” Because Trump faces multiple criminal charges, including attempting to overturn the 2020 election. And because Trump is “old and gaffe-prone himself.”

For the media to make Biden’s mental state “the overarching issue of the campaign is nothing short of journalistic malpractice,” Sullivan writes.

There are so many assumptions knotted into that statement you’ll never untangle them — but let’s try. The idea that the Times or the general press is making Biden’s brain the overarching issue of the campaign is preposterous. The ink is still wet on the Hur report. The Times news and opinion journalists approached Biden’s deficiencies from a number of angles because that what’s news outlets do with important news like the special counsel’s investigation. They, to use a phrase once popular at the Times, “flood the zone.”

To have downplayed the Hur report would have been the ultimate act of journalistic malpractice. If anything, the slow-walking the press has done up until this point on Biden’s brain comes closer to journalistic malpractice than do the welter of stories the Times has placed on Page One, on the editorial page, in columns by Maureen Dowd, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens, Nick Fox and elsewhere.

Sullivan compares the Times’ recent Biden coverage with what she and others consider the over-reporting on what she calls “the supposed scandal over Hillary Clinton’s email practices.” Nice try, but the Clinton emails were a story, deserving new reporting at every juncture between May 2015 — when the first emails were released by the State Department — until November 2016, when the 19th drop arrived.

Why has the press not better covered Biden’s mental haziness? It seemed to have no problem conjecturing that Donald Trump was going mad during his term in office.

The answer could be that his people conceal him from reporters, holding a skimpy number of press conferences where he can be observed. Biden’s aversion to exposure has become so extreme that for the second year in a row, he declined the traditional sit-down interview with the network telecasting the Super Bowl. An odd choice for a president running for reelection. The reflexive answer might be that the press adores Democrats and pulls for them at select opportunities. Such a thesis would require an investigation beyond the scope of this column, but for what it’s worth, I’ve now worked in two newsrooms covering national political news and I’ve never heard such sentiments voiced out loud or peddled covertly. That said, I remain open to the idea that bias plays a role, but require evidence beyond anecdote. And finally, our culture still practices a “respect your elders” ethic, with many considering it unseemly to criticize the old when they do the things old people do. Perhaps what the Hur report did was give the press the permission structure it was looking for to finally talk about Biden’s purported decline. It’s always easier to be the second guy saying the emperor is naked.

Some may think it inconvenient for democracy that the long-suppressed discussion of Biden’s mental vigor has arrived now as the campaign shifts to a higher gear and that it might hinder Biden’s ambitions for another term while benefiting another candidate who is toting more baggage than a luggage car.

While journalism can be useful in contributing to democracies, it should never allow itself to be enlisted by a candidate or a party to spike or bury truthful stories that some people think might wound democracy. If Biden’s batteries are as low as they seem to be — he did himself no favor at the defensive press conference he held last week about the Hur report — then muffling the story about his condition is among the worst wounds the press could inflict on democracy.

Taking a dive for an impaired candidate because his opponent is considered a monster — or even appearing to take a dive — will do nothing to restore the “trust” in the media that so many polls have measured as lacking. If you can’t trust the public with the absolute truth about a candidate, what’s the point of democracy?

Sullivan writes that she wishes that Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger would instruct his opinion editor and the top news editor to cease “going overboard with both coverage and commentary about Biden’s age” and “tone it down.” We can only hope that Sulzberger will stay in his office playing Wordle instead. The Times has gone at a real story the way a great newspaper should. And if anything, the paper is following, not leading, public interest in Biden’s age and abilities. In an NBC News poll published days before the Hur report’s release, 76 percent of all voters and 54 percent of Democratic Party voters said they had major or moderate concerns with Biden possessing the mental and physical health necessary for a second term.

A landslide of democratic interest in the president’s mental state appears to endorse the Times’ coverage. We can only hope the paper continues to go “overboard.” If anything, Hur appears to have finally begun the vetting of Biden’s mental acuity that the press and his party should have done long ago.

******

Why do we need a sportscaster to tell us the truth about Biden? On a recent Bill Maher episode, Bob Costas said this: “If Biden’s hubris is such that he doesn’t understand the best interest of his party, and more important his country, then he has to be shown the door. Period. Because if Trump is a threat to democracy, and in many ways he is, so too are the Dems, who are in danger of being as feckless as the Republicans have long been shameless.” Send Valentines and love notes to democracy to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter and Threads accounts hope that when they grow up they will be email accounts. My dead RSS feed craves anarchy.

The White House is going on the offensive with a new talking point to convince House members they need to pass the national security supplemental: failing to greenlight the bill means helping Iran.

According to a talking points memo and messaging memo obtained by POLITICO, the administration is arguing that Iran has sided with Russia in its war on Ukraine and has long supported Hamas. To not pass the legislation that gives aid to both Ukraine and Israel, then, would be to make life easier for Tehran.

“A House vote against American national security is a vote to appease and empower the Iranian regime. Period,” reads the document drafted by deputy press secretary and senior communications adviser Andrew Bates. “Iran is integral to Putin’s war effort in Ukraine, providing him with weapons and financial support. Right now, Russians are killing Ukrainian civilians with Iranian drones. Iran is even considering supplying Russia with short-range ballistic missiles.”

Ukrainian intelligence indicates Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps members are training Russian drone operators. The White House had previously revealed that Iran was in talks to send ballistic missiles to Russia.

The document also covers well-trodden political arguments by the Biden administration, namely that Republicans who oppose funding for Ukraine are siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Biden administration’s memo, which will be distributed to lawmakers, pundits and reporters, is targeted to shame House Republicans into supporting the aid package. In a not-so-thinly veiled attack on former President Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner in the presidential election, Bates mentions “unhinged, irresponsible voices on the right are even encouraging Russia to attack our closest allies and agitating to unravel NATO.”

The document is a clear indication the White House realizes it has more convincing to do. Despite general support for the measure in the House, passage of the supplemental is not guaranteed, so the administration will push its arguments within the halls of Congress and on the airwaves.

The Senate early Tuesday morning passed the $95 billion aid package providing Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan with military aid to fend off rivals. The legislation now moves to the House where Speaker Mike Johnson warns he may not bring the measure up for a vote because it lacks funding for border security, failing to mention that Senate Republicans refused to support a bipartisan deal to boost defenses at the U.S.-Mexico front.

House members from both parties have long said there’s support to pass the Senate-approved supplemental. It just needs to reach the floor.

“I believe that there are 300 votes for Ukraine. There are 400 votes for Israel,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), a former House Democratic leader, told POLITICO last week.

Joe Biden didn’t necessarily go viral in the 24 hours since his campaign launched a TikTok account, but the debut hasn’t been a bust, either.

So far, Biden’s account has picked up 67,000 followers. It’s hard to say how big or small that figure is for the leader of the free world, on a platform that’s decidedly not his demographic. But by comparison, he has a long way to go to catch up with his X account, which has nearly 38 million followers, or his campaign X account, which has 295,000.

As of Monday evening, the TikTok account had published four videos. The inaugural post — in which Biden answered lighthearted questions about the Super Bowl, and trolled Republicans over conspiracy theories — racked up 6 million views. A second post — titled “weird brag” and featuring clips of Donald Trump boasting about overturning Roe v. Wade — got over 84,000 views.

Another video of Biden poking fun at his age got 70,000 views. A fourth post Monday evening highlighted Trump’s recent comments that he would encourage Russia to go after “delinquent” NATO countries.

Democratic political consultants praised Biden’s foray onto a platform with a large audience of voters he’s polling poorly among.

Mark Jablonowski, president and chief technology officer at the digital firm DSPolitical, said Biden’s team seemed to inject the right amount of humor and cheeky digs in its posts.

“The last thing any campaign should do is use TikTok for posting sterile, boring content,” he said, adding that it’s a dire time for the Biden campaign to reach young voters on issues such as student loan forgiveness, abortion, and climate change.

Republicans were focused on China-security concerns surrounding the president joining TikTok, as opposed to the account’s content.

“Why is Biden on TikTok? Easy. Because he’s desperate,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote on X. “What message does it send? He doesn’t give a rip about Americans’ security or China’s spying.”

But Biden campaign officials, who insisted they were taking security precautions, crowed about their TikTok premiere in a news release Monday.

It is “proof positive of both our commitment and success in finding new, innovative ways to reach voters in an evolving, fragmented, and increasingly personalized media environment,” said Deputy Campaign Manager Rob Flaherty.

President Joe Biden on Monday warned Israel against invading the southern Gaza city of Rafah, insisting that the U.S. would not support any operation that fails to account for the safety of the Palestinians who fled there under Israeli orders.

“The major military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible plan for ensuring the safety and support of more than one million people sheltering there,” Biden said at the White House. “They need to be protected.”

Biden’s remarks during a joint appearance with King Abdullah II of Jordan mirrored the message that U.S. officials have privately relayed to Israeli leaders in an effort to head off a planned ground invasion of the city.

The president also leveled a rare measure of direct criticism at Israel over its broader war, saying “too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children.”

“Many families have lost not just one, but many relatives, and cannot mourn for them,” Biden said. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Biden’s appearance following a meeting with the Jordanian king represented his first extended remarks since Thursday night, when the president delivered a fiery rebuke of a special counsel report that repeatedly criticized his memory.

The report concluded that Biden’s mishandling of classified documents didn’t warrant criminal charges. But Special Counsel Robert Hur described the president as frequently forgetful — depictions that angered Biden and advisers who disputed them as gratuitous and incorrect, and revived scrutiny of the president’s age and mental acuity.

Democrats in the aftermath have urged the administration to dispel voter fears about Biden’s age by putting him out in public more often, including doing more press conferences and interviews that can showcase his leadership and command of the issues.

But there is little immediate evidence that the administration is changing its approach.

On Friday, the White House declined to hold a joint press conference with Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, eschewing the so-called 2×2 format occasionally employed when a foreign leader visits that allows a pair of outlets from each country to ask questions.

On Monday, Biden similarly opted against taking questions alongside the King of Jordan, and ignored a series of shouted questions as they left the room.

Biden briefly did allude to the special counsel’s criticisms of his memory during a speech Monday morning at the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference. Yet, like he has with the broader age concerns that have trailed him for months, he sought to turn it into a punchline.

“I know I don’t look like it, but I’ve been around a while,” Biden said. “I do remember that.”

But later, as he and Abdullah made remarks, Biden stuck strictly to his prepared comments about Israel’s war and the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza.

“We’re actively working for peace, security and dignity for both the Palestinian people and the Israeli people,” Biden said on Monday. “We’ve also been clear from the start: We oppose any forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.”

Biden added that the U.S. is working toward a deal between Israel and Hamas that would halt the fighting for at least six weeks, with the hope it would build toward a longer-term truce. But there are still elements that must be hammered out, he said, urging Israeli leaders to keep working toward a deal.

The president’s appeal comes as the relations between the U.S. and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have become increasingly strained. Biden has grown more critical of Netanyahu in public, saying last week that Israel’s war in Gaza has been “over the top.”

Biden and other senior officials have also repeatedly expressed opposition to a ground operation in Rafah in recent days, including a call with Netanyahu on Sunday where Biden relayed his reservations.

On Monday, Biden again insisted that Israel must eventually seek a two-state solution, adding that the Palestinian authority needed to be prepared to negotiate an enduring peace.

“Once Hamas’ control of Gaza is over, they must be prepared to build a state that accepts peace, does not harbor terrorist groups,” he said.