Politics
Is Russia an Adversary or a Future Partner? Trump’s Aides May Have to Decide.
When the nation’s intelligence chiefs go before Congress on Tuesday to provide their first public “Worldwide Threat Assessment” of President Trump’s second term, they’ll face an extraordinary choice.
Do they stick with their long-running conclusion about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, that his goal is to crush the Ukrainian government and “undermine the United States and the West?”
Or do they cast Mr. Putin in the terms Mr. Trump and his top negotiator with Russia are describing him with these days: as a trustworthy future business partner who simply wants to end a nasty war, get control of parts of Ukraine that are rightly his and resume a regular relationship with the United States?
The vexing choice has become all the more stark in recent days since Steve Witkoff, one of Mr. Trump’s oldest friends from the real estate world and his chosen envoy to the Mideast and Russia, has begun picking up many of Mr. Putin’s favorite talking points.
Mr. Witkoff wrote off European fears that Russia could violate whatever cease-fire is agreed upon and a peacekeeping force must be assembled to deter Moscow. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, the pro-MAGA podcaster, Mr. Witkoff said the peacekeeping idea was “a combination of a posture and a pose” by America’s closest NATO allies.
It is a view, he said, that was born of a “sort of notion of we’ve all got to be like Winston Churchill, the Russians are going to march across Europe.” He continued: “I think that’s preposterous.”
Just over three years after Russian troops poured into Kyiv and tried to take out the government, Mr. Witkoff argued that Mr. Putin doesn’t really want to take over all of Ukraine.
“Why would they want to absorb Ukraine?” he asked Mr. Carlson. “For what purpose, exactly? They don’t need to absorb Ukraine.” All Russia seeks, he argues, is “stability there.”
“I thought he was straight up with me,” Mr. Witkoff said of Mr. Putin, a striking characterization of a longtime U.S. adversary, and master of deception, who repeatedly told the world he had no intention of invading Ukraine.
Of all the head-spinning reversals in Washington these days, perhaps it is the Trump administration’s view of Russia and its seeming willingness to believe Mr. Putin that leave allies, intelligence officials and diplomats most disoriented.
Until Mr. Trump took office, it was the consensus view of the United States and its allies that they had been hopelessly naïve about Russia’s true ambitions for far too long — that they had failed to listen carefully to Mr. Putin when he first argued, in 2007, that there were parts of Russia that needed to be restored to the motherland. Then he invaded Georgia, annexed Crimea and sent the military — out of uniform — to conduct a guerrilla war in the Donbas.
Still, sanctions were slow to be applied, and Europe was far too slow to rearm — a point Mr. Trump himself makes when he presses the Europeans for more funds to defend themselves.
Now, Mr. Trump refuses to acknowledge the obvious, that Russia invaded Ukraine. He has been openly contradicted by several European leaders, who say that even if the United States plans to seek a normalization of relations with Russia, they do not. “I don’t trust Putin,” the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, told The New York Times last week. “I’m sure Putin would try to insist that Ukraine should be defenseless after a deal because that gives him what he wants, which is the opportunity to go in again.”
But for the American intelligence agencies, whose views are supposed to be rooted in a rigorous analysis of covertly collected and open-source analysis, there is no indication so far that any of their views about Mr. Putin and his ambitions have changed. So it will be up to the new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the new C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, to walk the fine line of describing Russia as a current adversary and future partner.
Mr. Witkoff headed down that road in his conversation with Mr. Carlson. “Share sea lanes, maybe send LNG gas into Europe together, maybe collaborate on A.I. together,” he said, after imagining a negotiated cease-fire in which Russia gets to hold the lands it now occupies and gets assurances that Ukraine will never join NATO. “Who doesn’t want to see a world like that?”
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the chamber’s Intelligence Committee, said comments by Mr. Witkoff and others in the Trump administration are deeply disorienting to American spies.
“If you grew up in the intelligence community knowing all the awful things Vladimir Putin had done and all of a sudden you have a change in posture where you completely take Russia’s side, how do you make sense of that?” Mr. Warner said.
Mr. Warner said the document that the intelligence community will unveil on Tuesday, its annual threat assessment, is very traditional and in keeping with previous versions of it. But what Mr. Trump’s intelligence leaders will say in testimony is not as clear. So far, Mr. Warner said, the administration’s comments on Ukraine have reflected anything but the traditional view of the threat from Russia.
The shifting American policy on Russia, Mr. Warner said, threatens intelligence partnerships. While America collects far more intelligence than other countries, he said, the combined contributions of key allies are substantial. And if their concerns about American policy and its faithful analysis of intelligence grow, they will share less.
Officials of several allies, while declining to speak on the record, pointed to several of Mr. Witkoff’s statements with alarm, saying they closely reflected Russian talking points. He endorsed Russian “referendums” in four key Ukrainian provinces that were widely viewed as rigged, with voters threatened with torture and deportation if they cast their ballot the wrong way. But Mr. Witkoff spoke as if they were legitimate elections.
“There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule,” he said. Shortly afterward, Oleksandr Merezhko, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Ukrainian Parliament, said on Monday that Mr. Witkoff should be removed from his position.
“These are simply disgraceful, shocking statements,” Mr. Merezhko told Ukrainian media. “He is relaying Russian propaganda. And I have a question: Who is he? Is he Trump’s envoy, or maybe he’s Putin’s envoy?”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was more circumspect in an interview with Time magazine released on Monday. He said he believed “Russia has managed to influence some people on the White House team through information.” Earlier, he had talked about the “web of disinformation” surrounding Mr. Trump, saying it contributed to their famously poor relationship.
He noted that Mr. Trump had repeated Mr. Putin’s claim that retreating Ukrainian forces in western Russia had been encircled.
“That was a lie,” Mr. Zelensky said.
Constant Méheut contributed reporting from Kyiv.
SACRAMENTO — State elections officials warned voters Tuesday to send their mail-in ballots in early after changes at the U.S. Postal Service that have led to slower mail service throughout California.
Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber said vote-by-mail ballots should be put in the mail at least a week before the June 2 election.
The officials also cast skepticism about social media posts that urge Democrats to vote “late” and to rally around one candidate in order to ensure a Republican doesn’t win. The posts are similar in wording and have spread on Facebook in the last week.
Bonta said the posts, which were brought up by The Times at a news conference in Sacramento, could be “misinformation” or “disinformation” and “potentially unlawful.”
“Get your ballot in the mail at least a week early,” he said. “You want to make sure your vote is counted. And the misinformation that you’re referencing is the misinformation we’re trying to combat.”
Voters using the postal service to mail their ballot within a week of the election should go inside the post office and ask that their ballot be postmarked, or can drop off their ballot at a secure voter box, officials said.
The new guidance comes after sweeping changes made by the Postal Service last year that has reduced the number of trips to pick up mail at post offices in mostly rural areas in the country, including California.
A Times analysis of last year’s November special election found that there was a significantly higher number of mail-in ballots that arrived too late to be counted compared with the 2024 election.
Rural counties saw some of the biggest increase in rejected ballots because they came in too late, The Times found.
The changes to the Postal Service are nationwide, but are particularly relevant in California because the vast majority of people vote in the state using mail-in ballots.
Voters who mail a ballot on election day, or even two days before, may not see their vote counted because it will arrive too late, Bonta told reporters.
“You want your vote to be counted, I want your vote to be counted,” Bonta said. “If you vote earlier, you maximize that possibility that it will.”
Vote-by-mail ballots are considered late if they are not postmarked on or ahead of election day or if the postmarked ballots do not arrive within seven days of the election.
Weber’s office also said it would look into a recent trend of social posts that urge California Democrats to “vote late” in the June 2 election.
The posts, which have appeared on Facebook and Instagram, are similar in wording, and tell Democrats to hold off from voting early to ensure that two Republican don’t make the two top spots, and to rally around one Democrat.
California’s primary election system allows the two candidates who received the most votes to advance to the November election, regardless of party.
With many Democrats crowding the ballot this year, some Democratic leaders have expressed concern fear that two Republicans — businessman Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — will take the top two spots because Democratic voters will be splintered among the party’s top seven candidates.
The validity of the social media posts are under scrutiny.
One post on Facebook last week, for instance, purports to be written by historian Heather Cox Richardson. The post warned voters not to vote until after all the debates in California have concluded and the front-runner is clear.
Richardson told The Times that she’s not connected to the post. “I didn’t write it and we can’t figure out who did,” she said in an email. “I haven’t — and won’t — take any position in a primary.”
The last statewide election in California was closely watched after the U.S. Department of Justice said would monitor polling sites in some California counties after a request by California Republican Party officials.
However, the election proceeded without any incident.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday sent a letter to elections officials in the state’s 58 counties that highlighted recent legislation mandating that California ballots be counted within 13 days, instead of 30 days. Newsom thanked the elections staff for their work and urged a speedy vote count.
“We must acknowledge that the longer the voting count takes,” Newsom wrote, “the more mis- and disinformation spreads.”
The Education Department has opened a civil rights investigation into whether Smith College, the women’s school in Northampton, Mass., violated anti-discrimination laws by allowing transgender students to enroll.
The inquiry broadens the Trump administration’s bid to limit rights for the nation’s transgender students by targeting school admissions for the first time. Until now, the administration had mostly targeted policies that allowed for transgender women to participate in women’s sports and use women’s bathrooms.
By investigating Smith, the administration is raising the question of whether allowing transgender women to enroll at a women’s college — and providing access to “women-only” spaces such as bathrooms, dormitories and locker rooms — violates civil rights protections for women.
Kimberly Richey, the assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, said in a statement that “an all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males.”
“Allowing biological males into spaces designed for women raises serious concerns about privacy, fairness and compliance under federal law,” Ms. Richey said. “The Trump administration will continue to uphold the law and fight to restore common sense.”
The college issued a statement acknowledging the investigation and stating that it remained “fully committed to its institutional values, including compliance with civil rights laws.”
About 4.7 percent of college students identify as transgender, according to the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, a group of doctors and scientists that has called for more government regulation of pediatric gender medicine.
The federal investigation was in response to a civil-rights complaint filed by Defending Education, a nonprofit group founded in 2021 that has become one of the leading voices in the growing parents’ rights movement. Several of the group’s complaints have sparked federal civil rights investigations during the past year, and its research is often cited during congressional hearings by conservative lawmakers.
Formerly known as Parents Defending Education, the Arlington, Va.-based group posted on its website a letter from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights on Monday announcing the investigation into Smith.
Smith, one of the nation’s largest women’s schools with about 2,500 students, has been admitting transgender students since 2015, along with several other top women’s colleges. The issue became a lightning rod at women’s colleges after a transgender applicant was denied acceptance to Smith in 2013 because her gender identity did not match her financial aid forms.
Since then, most women’s colleges updated their admissions policies to welcome transgender applicants. One notable exception has been Sweet Briar College in central Virginia, which does not admit transgender students and helps students in transition transfer to another college.
The Trump administration resolved 30 percent fewer civil rights complaints in the nation’s schools in 2025 compared with the Biden administration in 2024, the sharpest year-over-year decline in at least three decades. But the new administration has opened more than 40 civil rights investigations into schools and other educational institutions that provide protections for transgender students.
The Education Department has taken the unusual step of backing out of civil rights agreements that previous administrations negotiated to protect transgender students. The government has also sued state education departments and high school athletic associations in California and Minnesota over policies that permit transgender athletes to participate in school sports.
Politics
Elizabeth Warren’s Bezos Met Gala jab backfires as critics mercilessly drag ‘un-American’ lawmaker
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., drew intense criticism on Monday after she claimed on X that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos should pay more in taxes in response to him sponsoring the Met Gala, with conservatives questioning the senator’s record and accusing her of misrepresenting facts.
“The answer to everything, up to and apparently including bankrupting an airline at the cost of something like 15,000 jobs and the entire concept of budget airfare, is ‘Jeff Bezos has a lot of money though,’” venture capitalist and media founder Mike Solana wrote in response to Warren’s post.
Solana was referring to the recent demise of Spirit Airlines. Conservative commentators claim Spirit could have been saved if Warren hadn’t pushed to block JetBlue’s acquisition of the budget carrier on anti-trust grounds in 2024.
“If Jeff Bezos can drop $10 million to sponsor the Met Gala, he can afford to pay his fair share in taxes,” Warren said on Monday, sparking the glut of pushback from social media users.
WASHINGTON POST ARGUES THERE’S ‘LITTLE TO GAIN BY RAISING TAXES ON THE RICH,’ RATES ALREADY HIGH ENOUGH
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., questions Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 16, 2023. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
Following news that Bezos had cut an eight-figure check to fund the Met Gala, liberals in the entertainment industry such as Mark Ruffalo and Taraji P. Henson joined Warren in criticizing Amazon and Bezos for their allegedly unethical business practices. Protesters appeared outside the gala on Monday holding signs criticizing Bezos. One demonstrator was detained for trying to break into the event.
Warren’s message backfired online, as commenters pointed to the demise of Spirit Airlines and took issue with her tax policies across the years.
“Jeff Bezos employs over 1.5 million people at Amazon,” X user Gina Milan wrote. “You’re responsible for 17,000 workers losing their jobs and for blocking the merger that ultimately killed Spirit Airlines.”
Spirit put downward pressure on prices at other airlines and its folding could lead to an increase in overall travel prices, industry analysts told USA Today. Estimated job losses stemming from Spirit’s shuttering include approximately 15,000 direct employees and an additional 2,000 indirect employees.
“This myth just won’t die,” Reason Magazine reporter Billy Binion posted, responding to Warren’s assertion that Bezos isn’t paying enough in taxes. “In 2024 alone, it’s estimated Jeff Bezos paid almost $3 billion in taxes. Painting rich people as tax avoiders plays great on social media, but it’s not reality. The U.S. has the most progressive tax system in the developed world.”
Forbes estimates that Bezos paid $2.7 billion in taxes in 2024 after he sold $13.6 billion worth of Amazon stock. He reduced his tax burden that year by donating $2.5 billion in Amazon shares to charity over the three prior years. Bezos paid nearly $1 billion in taxes between 2014 and 2018, according to a ProPublica analysis of tax documents.
To minimize tax burdens, billionaires like Bezos often take out loans secured against their massive stock holdings to acquire spending money, according to securities filings reviewed by ProPublica. Since the IRS doesn’t consider loans income, this setup gives the wealthy access to cash without having to pay income taxes.
FROM ‘JUMP ON A BUS’ TO TAX CRACKDOWNS: BLUE STATES CHASE WEALTHY RESIDENTS FLEEING TO RED HAVENS
Billionaire Jeff Bezos attends the DealBook Summit. Critics on social media have accused Bezos of allowing the Washington Post to suffer amid hundreds of staff layoffs. (Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for The New York Times)
Some on social media pushed Warren for specifics on how she plans to make Bezos pay his “fair share.”
“What’s his fair share?” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, asked Warren. “What tax rate?”
Warren has proposed a wealth tax, charging households with net worths above $1 billion an annual tax worth 6% of their total wealth. Under Warren’s proposal, households with net worths between $50 million and $1 billion would be subject to a similar 2% tax.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks to a staff member before the Senate Banking Committee hearing on oversight of credit reporting agencies on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on April 27, 2023. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
CALIFORNIA’S HATRED FOR CAPITALISM IS KILLING THE GOOSE THAT LAID ITS GOLDEN EGG
Much of the growth in wealth experienced by Bezos and other billionaires comes through the unrealized gains of their assets, which Warren’s tax would target.
Writer Mike Coté pointed out that Bezos is “so rich that he can simply leave the jurisdiction or get citizenship elsewhere” if Warren’s tax plans were signed into law.
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“Liz Warren does not want progressive taxation,” he continued. “She wants confiscatory taxation. It’s fundamentally un-American. And it doesn’t work.”
Warren’s office did not respond to a request for comment sent by Fox News Digital Tuesday morning.
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