Alan Dershowitz: “It isn’t a Crisis. Yet.”
Watch the conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates
Watch the conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates
Watch the conversation on Vicky Ward Investigates
So, good news following the disappointing tech glitches of Wednesday.
Michael Wolff and I will now bring you the episode you should have seen on Wednesday on Monday at 5pm ET.
And then next Wednesday’s show will feature the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, as scheduled at 5pm.
Fortunately there is bigger and better news than my tech woes.
Tuesday, I had tea with Devon Archer.
For those of you who don’t know who he is: Archer, 50, is Hunter Biden’s former best friend and business partner. It was Archer who introduced Hunter Biden to the Ukraine energy company, Burisma and many other foreign businesses who loved the idea of aligning themselves with Joe Biden’s son. Archer is the one on the far left, in the now infamous 2014 photograph of the Bidens at the Sebonack golf club in Long Island.
The business relationship began in 2009. But in 2016 Archer was charged with securities fraud. After years of complex, drawn out litigation, he was due to serve a prison sentence for a year and a day when, on March 21st President Trump dramatically called him over at the NCAA Wrestling National Championships in Philadelphia and told him he was going to issue him a pardon. He officially pardoned him on March 25th. Archer is now a full-blown MAGA convert.
I have long been fascinated to know the real story of Devon Archer because in all my Epstein reporting and, also during my time at CNN, his name kept cropping up as someone in the room wheeling and dealing with all the same magnates, oligarchs, and VIPs around the world I’d be reporting about.
Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates
I was in Washington, DC on “Liberation Day” last week where the mood was distinctly different from that in New York City, where the derogatory talk about President Trump has predictably been on steroids: He’s a moron. A dictator. He’s destroying America and the World etcetera….
The summit of derogatory expression was possibly reached for me at least, on Tuesday night, even before the tariff mayhem was upon us. I sat in the audience at the New York Public Library listening to Timothy L. Snyder – the historian and author of On Tyranny – deliver the annual Bob Silvers lecture, after which he gravely answered questions about the possibility that the US would invade Canada.
“There are people not very far from here geographically who are making very practical preparations for that eventuality… There are conversations to be had now about the kind of rhetoric we’re using towards Canada, which is shockingly, shockingly similar to the rhetoric that Putin used before the invasion of Crimea in 2013, 2014,” Snyder said.
(Snyder and two other Yale professors have left the US for Canada, citing Trump fears – that’s a whole rabbit hole I won’t go down here.)
The crowd, which was noticeably absent of the billionaire capitalists who comprise the board of the New York Public Library, roared its applause.
And then the next morning, I headed to Washington, D.C.
Even the Acela train ride wasn’t without excitement.
Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates
Hey Everyone,
I have some exciting news! This coming week, on Wednesday April 9th at 5pm EST, I will kick off the first of a new weekly live video TV “show” that will be available to all my subscribers while it’s live. (Most of the recorded version will be available but behind a paywall.)
Each week on Wednesday afternoon, the TV version of Vicky Ward Investigates will last around thirty minutes and you’ll get my take on the news of the week — high, low, political, cultural, serious, trivial — and I’ll be chatting with some of the A-list sources and friends I’ve accumulated in the 35 years I’ve worked as a journalist both here and in the UK. So, Buckle Up! No topic is off limits! As many of you know, I am interested in anything and everything: In this newsletter I’ve written about domestic politics and foreign affairs, but also about Broadway, the movie Challengers, the vagaries of my reporting life; Elizabeth Holmes, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein; Alex Murdaugh; Armie Hammer and much, much more.
Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates
’ve just got to Washington, DC. Honestly, it’s exciting to be here in the midst of a crisis, although it’s such a crisis that meetings are being rescheduled left, right and center, which is vaguely irritating.
I’m hearing that, behind the facade, there is some nervousness about the fates of Pete Hegseth, who landed back in DC early this morning, and Mike Waltz. Probably, they survive, is the thinking…But even the most die-hard Trump loyalist knows that “SignalGate” was a very stupid own goal.
You also may recall that I’ve written here before that I am myself part of a group chat of what appears to be right-wing military types and I have no idea if any of them knows that I am on it.
Even some of them threw their hands in the air at the stupidity of it all.
“It was a crazy unforced error” someone posted, followed by the image I’ve reposted above.
There was also a fair degree of mirth.
“He’s running a more fun chat group than we are!” said one wag.
Another: “How can one get added?”
And: “It’s outrageous. They should have added XXX XXXX [our chat name] to this Signal Group!!!”
One (albeit very minor) aspect of the real group chat fiasco that seems to be under-reported is the remarkable flat-line temperament of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic who was accidentally added to the Signal group chat. I get that when Goldberg first saw he’d been invited, his instinct was to think, Ha ha I’m being played…But ask yourself this:
If you’d been added to it, and if, as the days went by and the thread gathered momentum, and, you began to realize that the chat may very well not be a hoax, AND that, on Saturday morning you were alerted to the strong possibility there could be a drone strike on the Houthis in two hours…would you have done what Goldberg apparently did when reading the strike was imminent and wait in his car in a supermarket parking lot?
Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates
Today, in our live chat, Mikhail not only told me what he’s hearing inside Russia and Ukraine after the phone calls between Trump and Putin, and then Trump and Zelensky: he also shared some of his personal journey.
He explains why he knew it was time to leave Russia in February 2022; how the Kremlin tried to break TV Rain, the independent station he worked at years earlier; but he had believed nonetheless that his work was not “in vain”. Until the invasion, when “it became hopeless”.
He also shared some thoughts about his late friend, Alexei Navalny, whom, he reminds us, believed so passionately that there was hope that democracy could live in Russia that he was prepared to die for it. It’s Mikhail’s belief that Navlany’s widow Yulia keeps that torch alight, albeit in exile.
Watch the conversation at Vicky Ward Investigates
Every time I talk to Mikhail Zygar, I feel both enlightened and depressed. Today he gave a foreshadowing of the love-fest that’s likely to happen on the call between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, in which Putin will “sell” Trump a hyperbolic narrative about events in Kursk, the Russian territory which Ukraine captured but Russia now appears to be taking back (his story is that the Russians have completely encircled the Ukrainians) – and also he speculates that there is no way Putin is going to give Trump everything he wants – which, at some point will lead to a blow-up. But when?
He says that Putin is thrilled that the West has finally produced a “soulmate” who sees the world as transactionally and cynically as he does. Mikhail walks us through his failed prior attempts to influence Tony Blair and George W. Bush among others. And he explains that most Russians don’t talk about the “war” with Ukraine. The country is in denial. Except, of course, for Putin, who visited the troops in Kursk last week – according to Zygar, for the first time wearing a military-style uniform..
We will be back tomorrow to discuss the call between Trump and Putin – after it has happened.
(And forgive the bad audio at the beginning. Thank you for letting us know so we could fix it…)
Watch the conversation at Vicky Ward Investigates
David Enrich is the Business Investigations Editor of the New York Times, the former Enterprise Editor of the Wall Street Journal and, no surprise, a very good journalist. In 2020 he wrote an excellent book on Deutsche Bank called Dark Towers that I highly recommend. And then, in 2022, he turned his lens to the law and published: Servants of the Damned about the powerful Washington DC law firms, in particular Jones Day.
He’s got a new book out this week, Murder The Truth that I’ve been diving into and it may be the best yet. It chronicles the fascinating trajectory of the First Amendment in this country and the dangerous direction it’s headed, under attack from the right, without most of us realizing it.
Since the 1964 Supreme Court decision in the case of the New York Times Co vs Sullivan, American journalists have enjoyed greater freedom than journalists almost anywhere else in the world, including in my native Britain. That’s because the court, then under the leadership of Earl Warren ruled that if a journalist was writing about a public official, that person would have to prove “actual malice” in order to establish libel. In other words, if you were a public figure you couldn’t successfully sue for defamation if the journalist had simply gotten their facts wrong. You had to prove they showed a “reckless disregard’ for the facts – ie that they knew their facts were wrong and published them anyway.
This led to a much higher burden of proof for US plaintiffs who are bold-faced names, institutions, and private individuals, not simply public officials – than elsewhere in the world.
It’s true that the Warren Court was possibly the most liberal court in US history. But, interestingly, the conservative legal scholar, Robert Bork, who will be familiar to listeners of my Audible series: Pipeline to Power – was a big supporter of the Sullivan decision and the way the Warren court interpreted the First Amendment.
Enrich chronicles the narrative of how since 2016 a number of high profile personalities on the right, including Peter Thiel, Sarah Palin and – of course – Donald Trump, as well big corporations, and others, have brought litigation that may well end up with a reversal of the Sullivan decision.
It’s happened piece-meal and, for the most part, in the shadows. Enrich argues that recent opinions penned byJustices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch could well portend the end of the free speech protections afforded by Sullivan – and why this matters.
Watch the conversation at Vicky Ward Investigates
Something different from me on a Monday.
I notice that over the weekend the New York Post published a well-timed articleabout how out-of-control the cost of Broadway tickets has gotten, with Othello,starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, breaking new records, even though the show is only in previews. Per the Post, you have to pay an extraordinary $900 to sit as far back as Row M. And the show hasn’t even officially opened!
So, I saw Othello last week. I booked a while ago, so maybe that’s why I did not pay anything like $900 apiece for my tickets (which were actually phenomenal – in Row B). But I did pay a lot more – by a margin of $300 or so – than the other shows I’ve also forked out for recently, which include: King Lear; The Nutcracker; Aida; Swan Lake; Redwood (a big mistake, as I wrote here), Glengarry Glen Ross; Good Night and Good Luck; The Portrait of Dorian Gray – and because I trust the impeccable taste and recommendations of the editor of Town and Country, Stellene Volandes in her new newsletter: Buena Vista Social Club.
So, was Othello worth the very, very big bucks?
Well, some context before I give you my thoughts.
Obviously, I am not an official critic or it wouldn’t be kosher for me to tell you what I think based on a preview. (The “official” theater critics aren’t supposed to write the reviews before the Opening Night, which is March 23, because that’s when they get free tickets to see it and the show is deemed now “set” for the rest of its run. But given the astronomical cost of a “preview” ticket, and the fact that the show only runs through June – I think the notion that a person shouldn’t write about it now is absurd).
Also, I have seen a lot of Shakespeare in my time.
That’s because I majored in English Literature at Cambridge University in the UK where we were lucky enough to spend an entire semester studying only Shakespeare. All of my English lit class dabbled in the theater, some rather more deeply than yours truly whose only memorable turn on stage was in The Importance of Being Earnest as the slightly snotty Gwendolen Fairfax (a role that some of the wags said was pitch perfect for me because it didn’t require any actual acting).
Even so, my time at Cambridge ingrained in me a love of theater and the performing arts. I was lucky enough to be surrounded at the time by a deep bench of serious talent who now comprise a Who’s Who of Big Names in Drama and Directing. My tutorial partner was Oscar winner, Rachel Weisz. Others in my class: Sacha Baron Cohen; Ol Parker (the writer and director of Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again!); Jez Butterworth (Tony Award Winner and, most recently the script writer of The Agent on Amazon Prime starring Michael Fassbender); David Farr (who wrote Hanna, adapted John le Carre’s The Night Manager for TV, and is associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company)….and a host of others. So, you get the point…suffice it to say, yes, we had the kind of college experience many people fantasize about. We immersed ourself in the five ps: poetry, plays, politics, “practical criticism” and partying…and we haven’t really stopped since.
So, in my not entirely ignorant opinion, is this Othello worth it?
Read on at Vicky Ward Investigates