The editors of the Washington Post have realized that rebuilding Ukraine will be very, very difficult:

A trial has begun in London involving efforts by Ukraine’s biggest bank to claw back nearly $2 billion, plus an even larger amount in interest, that it says was siphoned off fraudulently by its former co-owners. It’s an awkward fact that one of those former owners, who denies the charges, was for years a chief benefactor of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Mr. Zelensky has since broken with the former co-owner, Igor Kolomoisky, a media mogul who has been a focus of U.S. investigators probing money-laundering and fraud, and has sanctions imposed on him by the U.S. government for alleged corruption. Mr. Zelensky, elected on a platform of cleaning out the corruption that has long tainted the country, also strongly backed legislation, enacted in 2021, that targets oligarchs such as his onetime patron.

Still, the trial underway in the British High Court is a timely reminder that Kyiv’s work is unfinished, despite measures it has taken to build transparent, accountable, graft-free institutions. That work cannot wait, even as Ukraine fights for its survival against Russia’s calamitous invasion.

What country will want to pour money down the rathole that is present Ukrainian corruption?

I would add that just as Russia is corrupt because of Russia, Ukraine is corrupt because of Ukraine. The Russians didn’t make Ukraine corrupt. They didn’t help but they didn’t force the Ukrainians to be corrupt.

There are other complications as well. Will the Ukrainians that have settled in EU countries return to a non-corrupt Ukraine? How do you rebuild a country that consists mostly of the people who were unable flee?

At Outside the Beltway James Joyner has posted what I think is a pretty good round-up of legal opinion on some of the issues raised in the op-ed I cited yesterday. He concludes:

Like so many other things related to the Trump presidency, the problem is that the Constitution and laws of the land begin with the assumption that the President of the United States is a fundamentally decent human being who takes his oath of office seriously. There have certainly been Presidents who don’t quite meet those standards but none have been anything close to Trump in their sheer and utter disregard for the rule of law. And so here we are.

I was reminded of this observation by John Adams:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

which I think is worth taking seriously.

The point I was trying to make yesterday is that the law is not a flashing billboard. It is a labyrinth. If you are looking for justice or clarity, you will search in vain.

I do not know what is going to happen in the case against President Trump about the documents he retained in his residence and I don’t think anyone else does, either. If you think it is an open and shut case, you may well be disappointed.

I found this observation of George Beebe and Suzanne Loftus’s in their post at Responsible Statecraft worthy of consideration:

Although the United States has strong reasons to avoid direct involvement in war against Russia, the Ukrainians may well believe that drawing Moscow into a clash with the US military is their best hope for victory. An American approach to preventing escalation that is premised on tight Ukrainian discipline looks increasingly unwise.

I don’t know what the Ukrainians are thinking but I agree with the observation that they may see it in their interest to draw the U. S. military into the war with Russia more directly than we already are. In their situation it would only be prudent.

It also seems to me that there are factors which would increase or decrease that risk. For example, Ukraine’s counter-offensive succeeding completely would decrease the risk. It faring poorly would increase it.

Michael Bekesha makes a point in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

This should never have happened. The Presidential Records Act allows the president to decide what records to return and what records to keep at the end of his presidency. And the National Archives and Records Administration can’t do anything about it. I know because I’m the lawyer who lost the “Clinton sock drawer” case.

In 2009, historian Taylor Branch published “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President.” The book is based on recordings of Mr. Branch’s 79 meetings with Bill Clinton between Jan. 20, 1993, and Jan. 20, 2001. According to Mr. Branch, the audiotapes preserved not only Mr. Clinton’s thoughts on issues he faced while president, but also some actual events, such as phone conversations. Among them:

• Mr. Clinton calling several U.S. senators and trying to persuade them to vote against an amendment by Sen. John McCain requiring the immediate withdrawal of troops from Somalia
• Mr. Clinton’s side of a phone call with Rep. William Natcher (D., Ky.) in which the president explained that his reasoning for joining the North American Free Trade Agreement was based on technical forecasts in his presidential briefings.
• Mr. Clinton’s side of a phone conversation with Secretary of State Warren Christopher about a diplomatic impasse over Bosnia.
• Mr. Clinton seeking advice from Mr. Branch on pending foreign-policy decisions such as military involvement in Haiti and possibly easing the embargo of Cuba

The White House made the audiotapes. Nancy Hernreich, then director of Oval Office operations, set up the meetings between Messrs. Clinton and Branch and was involved in the logistics of the recordings. Did that make them presidential records?

The National Archives and Records Administration was never given the recordings. As Mr. Branch tells it, Mr. Clinton hid them in his sock drawer to keep them away from the public and took them with him when he left office.

When Judicial Watch made a FOIA request for the tapes and they lost on these ground:

Judge Jackson added that “the PRA contains no provision obligating or even permitting the Archivist to assume control over records that the President ‘categorized’ and ‘filed separately’ as personal records. At the conclusion of the President’s term, the Archivist only ‘assumes responsibility for the Presidential records.’ . . . PRA does not confer any mandatory or even discretionary authority on the Archivist to classify records. Under the statute, this responsibility is left solely to the President.”

That is very closely related to the point I’ve made in several posts about the constitutionality and enforceability of the PRA.

Said another way the charges filed against President Trump are not open and shut. I’m not staking a position out one way or the other—just pointing out that it’s complicated and may not be settled law.

Was anybody surprised that President Trump entered a “Not Guilty” plea this afternoon? I certainly wasn’t.

I found this piece by Scott Atlas on improving healthcare for minorities and the poor at RealClearPolitics interesting. The article itself is a sort of grab bag of complaints about the U. S. healthcare system and, particularly, Medicaid. Here’s a snippet:

The goal should be to increase access to high-quality health care and improve health, not simply to label people as “insured.” But Medicaid patients fare worse than patients using private insurance in study after study – even after standardizing for medical differences among patients. Those bad outcomes include more frequent complications and more deaths in treated cancers, heart procedures, transplants, and major surgeries. A 2013 Oregon randomized study’s most striking conclusion was that Medicaid fails to improve physical health beyond no insurance at all.

and here’s an example of what he’s complaining about:

Infant mortality rates have been improving in the U.S. since 1995, with the lowest in history for all races recorded in 2020, but infant mortality rate by race of the mother for blacks (10.38) remains double to triple that of infants born to whites (4.4), Hispanics (4.69), or Asians (3.14). Similarly, Hispanic Americans and whites have a life expectancy six years longer than blacks, not counting data since the pandemic.

That difference in health outcomes has been put forth as a key reason to expand single-payer health insurance in the United States. An inexplicably ignored logical flaw in that argument is that those very same health disparities for minorities are seen in the countries with the longest history of single-payer healthcare systems. For instance, in the government-run system of Canada, Inuit and First Nation infant mortality was two to four times that of non-indigenous Canadians and Quebecois. The same goes for the United Kingdom, where black Caribbean and black African infant mortality rates are double those of whites.

Decreasing infant mortality is a worthy goal but achieving it is not trivial. The very examples cited above illustrate the problems. Under the British system everyone is insured under the same system of national health. If the black mothers in the UK experience the same level of infant mortality as they do here in the States, it calls into question bringing everybody under the same system as a solution. Canada, where insurance is handled by the provinces, has problems on roughly the same scale. The infant mortality rate among Hispanics is roughly the same as among whites regardless of income.

There appears to be a pretty close correlation between low birthweight babies and infant mortality and there appears to be a correlation between substance use in pregnancy and low birthweight babies. Could it be that social issues have more to do with it than care or genetics?

I agree with this observation in Walter Russell Mead’s latest Wall Street Journal column:

As is traditional, Latin populists are blaming capitalism and the U.S. for the otherwise inexplicable failure of their pet policies. They are also rolling out the red carpet for America’s opponents, literally in the case of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, who is following up his navy’s recent visit to the region with official visits to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Ties with Russia and China are booming. Moscow has resumed its Cold War efforts to subsidize a Cuban economy that somehow, despite 60 years of enlightened socialist planning, remains unable to meet the basic needs of the population.

But Moscow’s efforts are dwarfed by Beijing’s. Chinese trade with Latin America and the Caribbean rocketed from $18 billion in 2002 to $450 billion 20 years later and is projected to reach $700 billion by 2035. From lithium mining in Bolivia to strategic ports at both ends of the Panama Canal, Chinese companies are getting involved in vital infrastructure. Eleven or more space facilities across five countries in the region give Beijing sophisticated tracking and surveillance capabilities, and China hopes to expand this network.

The steady incursions of U.S. rivals into the Western Hemisphere would have touched off a political firestorm at any time since James Monroe issued his famous doctrine. But Latin America and the Caribbean are the last remaining places where the American foreign-policy establishment appears to cling to post-Cold War complacency about America’s rivals. Just as the establishment once scoffed at the idea that Russian ambitions in the former Soviet republics could pose a threat to European peace, or that China’s military buildup around Taiwan could affect American interests, it now blandly dismisses the idea that focused Chinese, Russian and Iranian activism in the Western Hemisphere could undermine American security.

At this point there is barely a stable government in all of Latin America. Our relations with our southern neighbors have hardly been worse even as our Hispanic population has never been greater.

I find it hard to understand why we’re focusing so little attention on Central and South America and so much practically everywhere else.

Here’s the kernel of Alan Dershowitz’s Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Mr. Smith has made a stronger case against Mr. Trump than many observers, including me, expected. The question remains: Is it strong enough to justify an indictment of the leading candidate to challenge the president in next year’s election? Even with the recorded statements, this case isn’t nearly as strong as the one that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Nixon was almost certainly guilty of destroying evidence, bribing witnesses and other acts of obstruction. Many of the charges in this case are matters of degree. Nor have prosecutors any evidence that Mr. Trump’s actions damaged national security more than those of Mr. Biden, Mr. Pence and Mrs. Clinton did.

When an incumbent administration prosecutes the leading candidate against the president, it should have a case that is so compelling that it attracts the kind of bipartisan support that forced Nixon to resign. No such support is currently apparent, since many Republicans continue to be troubled by the targeting of Mr. Trump. Mr. Smith will have to convince not only a Miami jury but the American public, on both sides of the partisan divide.

Mr. Dershowitz is correct that President Trump in his truculent attitude towards his accusers has created some of his own problems:

Mr. Smith had a lot of help from Mr. Trump. Had the former president cooperated with investigators and immediately returned all the classified material in his possession, as Messrs. Biden and Pence did, charges would have been unlikely.

Unmentioned is that it is also possible that the multiple baseless or, at the very least, weak accusations made against Mr. Trump by his political opponents since before the election has rendered the bipartisan consensus referred to above by Mr. Dershowitz on Watergate less likely.

If President Trump is tried on the charges in the indictment and not convicted or if the case is dismissed in the courts, will you be satisfied with the outcome?

I’ll be satisfied with the outcome whatever it might be. I also think the charges are serious.