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This (below) is a tweet from over the weekend from the Russian Embassy in South Africa. It’s an example of the dynamic I was talking about yesterday. U.S. diplomats have apparently told NATO allies, based on U.S. intelligence, that Russia had set February 16th, Wednesday, as a possible or probable invasion date. This is at least consistent with various moves by the U.S. and NATO allies over recent days — pulling out dependents, canceling civilian flights and such. Here Russia is denying it has any plans to invade on Wednesday and claims that the warnings are part of a U.S. plot to create a provocation which justifies NATO military action inside Ukraine. This is the kind of wrong-footing I’m talking about.

There has been a growing chorus of articles arguing that the Biden administration is trying to confront Russia on its own ground of information warfare. The key example is moving rapidly to declassify military intelligence about Russian moves to eliminate their potential element of surprise. The administration is trying to upend Russian tactics by continually revealing what they’re about to do or what they are preparing to do in advance. But there is something else they are doing that is getting less direct attention, something I mentioned earlier this month.

I wanted to share with you this post about the situation in Ottawa, sent along TPM Reader JK. I recommend reading the whole thing. But this is the gist:

What’s happening in Ottawa, they were clear, is two separate events happening in tandem: there is a broadly non-violent (to date) group of Canadians with assorted COVID-related gripes, ranging from the somewhat justified to totally frickin’ insane. But that larger group, which has knocked Ottawa and too many of our leaders into what my colleague Jen Gerson so perfectly described as “stun-fucked stasis,” is now providing a kind of (mostly) unwitting cover to a cadre of seasoned street brawlers whose primary goal is to further erode the legitimacy of the state — not just the city of Ottawa, or Ontario or Canada, but of democracies generally.

This morning’s latest on Trump’s seemingly pervasive destruction and theft of government documents and classified material is that White House officials periodically found the toilets in the White House residence clogged with wads of flushed paper, which they believed — reasonably enough! — were government documents the President had tried to destroy. This revelation comes from Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming Trump book “Confidence Man.” Axios has the scoop. Because of course it does. Mike Allen described this as adding “a vivid new dimension to his lapses in preserving government documents,” which struck me as a generous way to describe it.

Just moments ago the Post reported that the National Archives has asked the Justice Department to investigate ex-President Trump’s handling of White House records and possible violations of the Presidential Records Act. For clarity, the PRA is the post-Watergate statute that makes clear the the work product of the presidency belongs to the American public and not the individual president. As is so often the case, adjudicating Trump’s infractions is paradoxically complicated by their sheer brazenness. I mean, what is there to investigate? The violations have been so open that he seems to be saying with his actions that his actions are okay. Trump for years openly destroyed records covered by the PRA. (His staff reportedly attempted to piece them back together with tape.) Then he absconded with 15 boxes of records that the National Archives had to recover from Mar-a-Lago.

A short time ago, Mitch McConnell was asked whether the Jan. 6th insurrection was “legitimate political discourse” and he responded saying that it was on the contrary a “violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election.”

Video after the jump …

The RNC said crystal clear and out in the open that January 6th was “legitimate political discourse.” The first explanation of how this didn’t mean what it clearly meant was that they somehow only meant the stuff that happened before things got violent and turned into an insurrection. So only the pre-insurrection stuff even though the only reason anyone is investigating January 6th is the violence and insurrection. Now Kevin McCarthy, literally dashing away as Manu Raju asked him the question, is trying another tack. He says the RNC statement about Jan. 6th wasn’t even about January 6th. It was about six members of the RNC who have been subpoenaed by the committee. And they were in Florida on Jan. 6th. And remember it has nothing to do with Jan. 6th. Which RNC members? He won’t say.

Here’s the video.

I’m highly skeptical of the savior/voice of reason role carved out for Ivanka Trump in this report from the Associated Press. But it’s still a very illuminating account of the course of events at the White House on the afternoon of January 6th. In one noteworthy addition, the account notes that as news networks were reporting live video of violent assaults and chaos at the Capitol Trump was cheering them on and seemingly providing his own live color commentary, rewinding and replaying the best parts to watch again. He couldn’t figure out why everyone else didn’t think it was as cool as he did.