BRUSSELS — The U.S. must preserve and grow the dominance of its financial sector worldwide, President Donald Trump argues in his new National Security Strategy. The 33-page document is a rare formal explanation of Trump’s foreign policy worldview by his administration, and can shape U.S. policy priorities. “The United States boasts the world’s leading financial and capital markets, which are pillars of American influence that afford policymakers significant leverage and tools to advance America’s national security priorities,” the document states. “But our leadership position cannot be taken for granted,” it continues, calling on America to leverage “our dynamic free market system and our leadership in digital finance and innovation to ensure that our markets continue to be the most dynamic, liquid, and secure and remain the envy of the world.” The strategy lists the “world’s leading financial system and capital markets, including the dollar’s global reserve currency status” as one of the U.S. key levers of power. Trump’s comments come as Europe looks to grow its own finance system to reduce the continent’s dependence on Wall Street. The EU has put forward a broad plan to boost its own finance industry by strengthening its single market for investment, and it will draft policy plans in the coming months aiming to boost its banks’ ability to compete globally. It is also creating a digital version of the euro currency, which would reduce its reliance on the dollar and on U.S. payment giants.

LONDON — Britain’s shortest-serving Prime Minister Liz Truss is launching her own YouTube show. She wants it to be the home of a “counter-revolution.” “The Liz Truss Show,” which launches Friday, will be a “bold new program in a media landscape dominated by groupthink and timid consensus,” a press statement announcing the show declared. She will be “taking the gloves off,” it added. Truss, who spent just 49 days in office before being ousted by her own party, has been active on the lucrative U.S. speech circuit since leaving office in 2022. She has repeatedly insisted the market crisis which triggered her downfall was not her fault. “The Deep State tried to destroy me but now I’m back and excited to launch this show,” she said. Truss is making the show with American journalist John Solomon’s Just the News network. Episodes will be released each week on both video and audio platforms including YouTube, Rumble and Spotify. The ex-PM said:  “People in Britain, America, and across the free world are tired of being talked down to. They’re tired of experts who get everything wrong, elites who refuse to listen, and weak leaders who won’t stand up for Western values.” After losing office, Truss wrote her memoir, which blamed the Bank of England, Treasury and Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog for her economic woes.

The EU will on Thursday unveil plans to supercharge its finance industry, tearing up swathes of rules in a bid to take on Wall Street. The package, which is massive in scope and ambition, would amend at least 10 financial laws to crack down on protectionism and unclog the EU’s financial plumbing. But Brussels’ ambitions to create a U.S.-style financial market will reopen political wounds, especially its plan to create a powerful EU watchdog for financial markets. Despite the bloc’s urgent need for private investment, progress could be bogged down by political divisions over the strategy. “If we’re stuck in a never-ending discussion about how to organize supervision … that will not take us closer to our objective,” Swedish Minister for Financial Markets Niklas Wykman said. The Commission’s overarching goal is to remove barriers to investment in the bloc, allowing more money to flow to struggling businesses so the EU can better keep up with economic powerhouses like the U.S. and China. With national budgets under strain from a bruising pandemic and years of inflation, Brussels is hoping to unlock €11 trillion in cash savings held by EU citizens in their bank accounts to breathe life into the economy. It plans to do that by breaking down technical barriers and busting protectionism between the EU’s 27 national money markets, as well as by changing rules that create national barriers to finance flows and by creating a powerful EU watchdog for financial markets. The EU’s finance chief, Maria Luís Albuquerque, who has led work on the revamp, told POLITICO in an interview: “It’s going to be a difficult discussion, of course, but these are the ones worth having, right?” | Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Images Some capitals, though, view the proposal as a power grab and are determined to keep oversight of financial markets at the national level. And there are other tweaks in the package that will dredge up painful recent debates over issues like crypto rules or trading data. Countries are already warning that the Commission should keep its nose out of their business. Sweden, the EU’s best-in-class country for financial markets, has warned the EU executive not to interfere with any rules but instead to focus on boosting the appetite of EU citizens to invest in products like stocks and bonds, rather than parking their cash in savings accounts. Supervision is “not the problem and it’s not the solution to the problem,” Wykman told POLITICO. Among other ideas the Commission was mulling ahead of the official publication — according to documents seen by POLITICO — are a stronger EU-wide public ‘ticker tape’ of trading data, an expanded pilot program for decentralized finance to include all products and crypto firms, and a reduction in paperwork to make it easier to sell investment funds across the EU. The plans are sure to please some industry players, like stock exchanges or central securities-depositary groups that operate in multiple EU countries. But they will also inevitably be opposed by others, such as asset managers who are reluctant to be subject to increased EU oversight, or stock exchanges that don’t want to see their pricey trading data services undercut by a stronger public EU ticker tape. The technical shifts, plus the idea of an EU-wide watchdog, are ambitious but are also reminders of how limited the Commission’s powers are compared those deployed by EU countries at the national level. The Commission can’t make game-changing reforms in areas like national pensions, taxation or insolvency law for businesses, all of which are major obstacles to a single money market. Nor will many national governments spend the political capital needed to make domestic reforms for the sake of the EU economy. Nonetheless, the Commission is sticking to its guns. The EU’s finance chief, Maria Luís Albuquerque, who has led work on the revamp, told POLITICO in an interview: “It’s going to be a difficult discussion, of course, but these are the ones worth having, right?”

Businesses from Wall Street to main street are struggling to comply with President Donald Trump’s byzantine tariff regime, driving up costs and counteracting, for some, the benefits of the corporate tax cuts Republicans passed earlier this year. Trump has ripped up the U.S. tariff code over the past year, replacing a decades-old system that imposed the same tariffs on imports from all but a few countries with a vastly more complicated system of many different tariff rates depending on the origin of imported goods. To give an example, an industrial product that faced a mostly uniform 5 percent tariff rate in the past could now be taxed at 15 percent if it comes from the EU or Japan, 20 percent from Norway and many African countries, 24 to 25 percent from countries in Southeast Asia and upwards of 50 percent from India, Brazil or China. “This has been an exhausting year, I’d say, for most CEOs in the country,” said Gary Shapiro, CEO and vice chair of the Consumer Technology Association, an industry group whose 1,300 member companies include major brands like Amazon, Walmart and AMD, as well as many small businesses and startups. “The level of executive time that’s been put in this has been enormous. So instead of focusing on innovation, they’re focusing on how they deal with the tariffs.” Upping the pressure, the Justice Department has announced that it intends to make the prosecution of customs fraud one of its top priorities. The proliferation of trade regulations and threat of intensified enforcement has driven many companies to beef up their staff and spend what could add up to tens of millions of dollars to ensure they are not running afoul of Trump’s requirements. The time and expense involved, combined with the tens of billions of dollars in higher tariffs that companies are paying each month to import goods, amount to a massive burden that is weighing down industries traditionally reliant on imported products. And it’s denting, for some, the impact of the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax cuts that companies will receive over the next decade via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act championed by the White House. “Every CEO survey says this is their biggest issue,” said Shapiro. A recent survey by KPMG, a professional services firm, found 89 percent of CEOs said they expect tariffs to significantly impact their business’ performance and operations over the next three years, with 86 percent saying they expect to respond by increasing prices for their goods and services as needed. Maytee Pereira, managing director for customs and international trade at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, another professional services firm, has seen a similar trend. “Many of our clients have been spending easily 30 to 60 percent of their time having tariff conversations across the organization,” Pereira said. That’s forced CEOs to get involved in import-sourcing decisions to an unprecedented degree and intensified competition for personnel trained in customs matters. “There’s a real dearth of trade professionals,” Pereira said. “There isn’t a day that I don’t speak to a client who has lost people from their trade teams, because there is this renewed need for individuals with those resources, with those skill sets.” But the impact goes far beyond a strain on personnel into reducing the amount of money that companies are willing to spend on purchasing new capital equipment or making other investments to boost their long-term growth. “People are saying they can’t put money into R&D,” said one industry official, who was granted anonymity because of the risk of antagonizing the Trump administration. “They can’t put money into siting new factories in the United States. They don’t have the certainty they need to make decisions.” A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. However, the administration has previously defended tariffs as key to boosting domestic manufacturing, along with their overall economic agenda of tax cuts and reduced regulation. They’ve also touted commitments from companies and other countries for massive new investments in the U.S. in order to avoid tariffs, although they’ve acknowledged it will take time for the benefits to reach workers and consumers. “Look, I would have loved to be able to snap my fingers, have these facilities going. It takes time,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview this week on Fox News. “I think 2026 is going to be a blockbuster year.” For some companies, however, any benefit they’ve received from Trump’s push to lower taxes and reduce regulations has been substantially eroded by the new burden of complying with his complicated tariff system, said a second industry official, who was also granted anonymity for the same reason. “It is incredibly complex,” that second industry official said. “And it keeps changing, too.” Matthew Aleshire, director of the Milken Institute’s Geo-Economics Initiative, said he did not know of any studies yet that estimate the overall cost, both in time and money, for American businesses to comply with Trump’s new trade regulations. But it appears substantial. “I think for some firms and investors, it may be on par with the challenges experienced in the early days of Covid. For others, maybe a little less so. And for others, it may be even more complex. But it’s absolutely eating up or taking a lot of time and bandwidth,” Aleshire said. The nonpartisan think tank’s new report, “Unintended Consequences: Trade and Supply Chain Leaders Respond to Recent Turmoil,” is the first in a new series exploring how companies are navigating the evolving trade landscape, he said. One of the main findings is that it has become very difficult for companies to make decisions, “given the high degree of uncertainty” around tariff policy, Aleshire said. Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs — imposed on most countries under a 1977 emergency powers act that is now being challenged in court — start at a baseline level of 10 percent that applies to roughly 100 trading partners. He’s set higher rates, ranging from 15 to 41 percent, on nearly 100 others, including the 27-member European Union. Those duties stack on top of the longstanding U.S. “most-favored nation” tariffs. Two notable exceptions are the EU and Japan, which received special treatment in their deals with Trump. Companies also could get hit with a 40 percent penalty tariff if the Trump administration determines an item from a high-tariffed country has been illegally shipped through a third country — or assembled there — to obtain a lower tariff rate. However, businesses are still waiting for more details on how that so-called transshipment provision, which the Trump administration outlined in a summer executive order, will work. The president also has hit China, Canada and Mexico with a separate set of tariffs under the 1977 emergency law to pressure those countries to do more to stop shipments of fentanyl and precursor chemicals from entering the United States. Imports from Canada and Mexico are exempt from the fentanyl duties, however, if they comply with the terms of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trade pact Trump brokered in his first term. That has spared most goods the U.S. imports from its North American neighbors, but also has forced many more companies to spend time filling out paperwork to document their compliance. Trump’s increasingly baroque tariff regime also includes the “national security” duties he has imposed on steel, aluminum, autos, auto parts, copper, lumber, furniture and heavy trucks under a separate trade law. But the administration has provided a partial exemption for the 25 percent tariffs he has imposed on autos and auto parts, and has struck deals with the EU, Japan and South Korea reducing the tariff on their autos to 15 percent. In contrast, Trump has taken a hard line against exemptions from his 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, and recently expanded the duties to cover more than 400 “derivative” products, such as chemicals, plastics and furniture, that contain some amount of steel and aluminum or are shipped in steel and aluminum containers. And the administration is not stopping there, putting out a request in September for further items it can add to the steel and aluminum tariffs. “This is requiring companies that do not even produce steel and aluminum products to keep track of and report what might be in the products that they’re importing, and it’s just gotten incredibly complicated,” one of the industry officials granted anonymity said. That’s because companies need to precisely document the amount of steel or aluminum used in a product to qualify for a tariff rate below 50 percent. “Any wrong step, like any incorrect information, or even delay in providing the information, risks the 50 percent tariff value on the entire product, not just on the metal. So the consequence is really high if you don’t get it right,” the industry official said. The administration has also signaled plans to similarly expand tariffs for other products, such as copper. And the still unknown outcomes of ongoing trade investigations that could lead to additional tariffs on pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, critical minerals, commercial aircraft, polysilicon, unmanned aircraft systems, wind turbines, medical products and robotics and industrial machinery continue to make it difficult for many companies to plan for the future. Small business owners say they feel particularly overwhelmed trying to keep up with all the various tariff rules and rates. “We are no longer investing into product innovation, we’re not investing into new hires, we’re not investing into growth. We’re just spending our money trying to stay afloat through this,” said Cassie Abel, founder and CEO of Wild Rye, an Idaho company which sells outdoor clothing for women, during a virtual press conference with a coalition of other small business owners critical of the tariffs. Company employees have also “spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours counter-sourcing product, pausing production, restarting production, rushing production, running price analysis, cost analysis, shipping analysis,” Abel said. “I spent zero minutes on tariffs before this administration.” In one sign of the duress small businesses are facing, they have led the charge in the Supreme Court case challenging Trump’s use of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose both the reciprocal and the fentanyl-related tariffs. Crutchfield Corp., a family-owned electronics retailer based in Charlottesville, Virginia, filed a “friend of the court” brief supporting the litigants in the case, in which the owners detailed its difficulties in coping with Trump’s erratic tariff actions. “If tariffs can be imposed, increased, decreased, suspended or altered … through the changing whim of a single person, then Crutchfield cannot plan for the short term, let alone the long run,” the company wrote in its brief, asking “the Court to quell the chaos.”

President Donald Trump on Friday directed Attorney General Pam Bondi and the FBI to investigate links between Jeffrey Epstein and notable Democrats, the president’s latest attempt to deflect scrutiny over his connections to the late disgraced financier by focusing on his political opponents. In a social media post, Trump pushed Bondi to target former President Bill Clinton, Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman and former Harvard President Larry Summers, who served in senior positions in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, along with the bank JPMorgan Chase. “This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats. Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his ‘Island,’” he wrote. “Stay tuned!!!” None of the Democrats named by Trump have been accused by prosecutors of wrongdoing. Bondi quickly assigned Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, who heads the office that prosecuted Epstein and won the conviction of his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, to run point on the probe. “Thank you, Mr. President,” Bondi wrote. “SDNY U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton is one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country, and I’ve asked him to take the lead. As with all matters, the Department will pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people.” Clayton, however, may be hamstrung in his efforts to further investigate Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. In July, the Trump administration fired one of the last remaining prosecutors in the Manhattan office who worked on the Epstein and Maxwell cases: Maurene Comey. Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, wasn’t provided an explanation for her firing, and she is suing the Trump administration over her termination. The White House has spent much of the week struggling to contain the fallout after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday released emails in which Epstein said Trump “knew about the girls” without providing further evidence. Trump and his allies have denied that he knew about Epstein’s crimes, and no evidence has suggested that Trump took part in Epstein’s trafficking operation. Epstein killed himself in jail while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in 2019. Administration officials have argued that Democrats dropped the emails to distract from Republicans’ success in ending a record-long government shutdown and that none of them incriminate the president. Also this week, Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) succeeded in triggering a discharge petition to force a vote in the House on the release of all the Epstein files. Senior GOP officials believe that dozens of House Republicans could join Democrats in voting for the disclosure bill. Trump and Epstein were friends, but the president has maintained for years the two had a falling out decades ago and has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing associated with Epstein. “Some Weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and foolish,” Trump wrote in another Truth Social post Friday. “Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem!” Trish Wexler, head of policy and advocacy communications for JPMorgan Chase, said in an email Friday that “the government had damning information about [Epstein’s] crimes and failed to share it with us or other banks.” “We regret any association we had with the man, but did not help him commit his heinous acts,” she said. “We ended our relationship with him years before his arrest on sex trafficking charges.” The Department of Justice pointed to Bondi’s post on X when asked for more information about any steps it is taking to comply with Trump’s request. Representatives for Clinton and Summers did not immediately reply to requests for comment. Hoffman denied having a relationship with Epstein beyond solicitations for donations revealed in the emails released by Oversight Democrats, and called on Trump to release all files connected to the Epstein investigation. “I want this complete release because it will show that the calls for baseless investigations of me are nothing more than political persecution and slander,” Hoffman wrote on X. At least one House Republican was critical of Trump’s call for an investigation. Retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) — who indicated earlier this week that he’d vote in favor of the House bill demanding the DOJ release the Epstein files — said he doesn’t think Trump’s ask is “appropriate,” saying the Justice Department shouldn’t act on cases because of pressure from the White House. “We should leave the DOJ and make them as independent as we can,” he told CNN on Friday. “When the president gives orders to Pam Bondi and our law enforcement arms of the federal government — what it does is it undercuts the credibility of our law enforcement.” JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank, did business with Epstein for many years, including lending money to the financier and helping to move his assets overseas. The bank ended its association with Epstein in 2013 and in 2019, it filed a suspicious activity report regarding Epstein and his associates’ transactions. Senate Democrats recently opened a new line of inquiry into the bank regarding its association with Epstein. The bank has previously expressed regret for its involvement with Epstein, and has emphasized that it did not have knowledge of his illegal activities. JPMorgan Chase settled lawsuits in 2023 with the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein had a compound, and with some of Epstein’s victims. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was among a coterie of Wall Street executives who met with the president for dinner earlier this week. He has previously said that he would comply with an Epstein subpoena. Aiden Reiter, Faith Wardwell and Aaron Pellish contributed to this report.

U.S. President Donald Trump said he plans to sue the BBC for up to $5 billion over a misleading edit of his speech, after the broadcaster apologised but declined to compensate him.  “We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1 billion and $5 billion, probably sometime next week,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One Friday evening. “We have to do it.”  The BBC conceded on Thursday that edited footage of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech on its Panorama documentary program had unintentionally created “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action,” and said the segment would not be aired again.  While Britain’s state broadcaster apologized to the president for the way it edited his speech, it said it would not offer financial compensation, as Trump has demanded. Two of the BBC’s top executives, Director General Tim Davie and its news chief, Deborah Turness, resigned over the incident and accusations of biased coverage. BBC chair Samir Shah sent a personal apology Thursday to the White House.  Trump has launched a flurry of lawsuits against publications and media companies he has accused of being unfriendly and defamatory, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, ABC and Paramount. In July, Paramount agreed to settle a $20 billion lawsuit filed by Trump over an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris on CBS news program “60 Minutes” that the president said was deceptively edited, paying him $16 million.  The crux of Trump’s BBC complaint is a segment in which footage in the Panorama show was selectively edited to suggest, incorrectly, that the U.S. president had told supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”   The words were in fact spliced from sections of the speech almost an hour apart, and omitted a section in which Trump had said he wanted supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” 

L’uomo che aveva previsto la crisi dei mutui subprime chiude il suo hedge fund. Una mossa che arriva dopo aver avvisato che le valutazioni dei titoli azionari stanno diventando sconnesse dei fondamentali. Michael Burry, il celebre finanziere immortalato nel film La Grande Scommessa, sta chiudendo il suo fondo Scion Asset Management. L’hedge fund di Burry, re di coloro che scommettono “contro” i mercati, ha smesso di essere registrato presso gli enti regolatori statunitensi, secondo il database della Sec, la Consob americana, secondo quanto riferisce il Financial Times. Burry ha inviato ai suoi investitori una lettera in cui ha detto che liquiderà i fondi e restituirà il capitale entro la fine dell’anno: “La mia stima del valore dei titoli non è ora, ma lo è da tempo, non in linea con i mercati”, si legge nella missiva datata 27 ottobre. La decisione di chiudere Scion Asset management arriva mentre tra gli investitori serpeggia il nervosismo per una possibile bolla legata alle valutazioni stellari raggiunte dai titoli legati all’intelligenza artificiale. Lo stesso Burry, una decina di giorni fa, aveva spostato buona parte del suo portafoglio scommettendo al ribasso. Era seguita la peggior performance settimanale di Wall Street dalla scorsa primavera, quando Donald Trump ha iniziato la sua guerra commerciale. L'articolo Michael Burry (La Grande Scommessa) chiude il suo fondo dopo l’allarme bolla dell’intelligenza artificiale proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.

LONDON — Donald Trump’s war against the media has gone international.  Britain’s public service broadcaster has until 10 p.m. U.K. time on Friday to retract a 2024 documentary that he claims did him “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” — or potentially face a $1 billion lawsuit (nearly £760 million). It’s the U.S. president’s first notable battle with a non-American media organization. The escalation from Trump comes as the BBC is already grappling with the double resignations this past weekend of two top executives, Director General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness, amid the growing furor sparked by the release last week of an internal ombudsman’s report criticizing the Trump program as well as the BBC’s coverage of the Gaza war. Trump told Fox News he believes he has “an obligation” to sue the corporation because “they defrauded the public” and “butchered” a speech he gave. POLITICO walks you through the possible road ahead — and the potential pitfalls on both sides of the Atlantic.  WHY IS TRUMP THREATENING TO SUE?  The U.S. president is objecting to the broadcaster’s reporting in a documentary that aired on Panorama, one of the BBC’s flagship current affairs shows, just days before the U.S. presidential election.  The program included footage from Trump’s speech ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, which was selectively edited to suggest, incorrectly, that he told supporters: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”   But those lines were spoken almost an hour apart, and the documentary did not include a section where Trump called for supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”  “I really struggle to understand how we got to this place,” former BBC legal affairs correspondent Clive Coleman told POLITICO. “The first lesson almost you’re taught as a broadcast journalist is that you do not join two bits of footage together from different times in a way that will make the audience think that it is one piece of footage.” The U.S. president’s legal team claimed the edit on the footage was “false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory” and caused him “to suffer overwhelming financial and reputational harm.”  BBC Chair Samir Shah apologized on Monday for the “error of judgment” in the edit. Trump’s lawyers said in their letter that they want a retraction, an apology and appropriate financial compensation — though their client’s subsequent comments suggest that may not satisfy him at this point. DO TRUMP’S CLAIMS STAND A CHANCE?  Trump’s lawyers indicated in their letter that he plans to sue in Florida, his home state, which has a two-year statute of limitations for defamation rather than the U.K.’s one-year limit — which has already passed.  The U.S. president is objecting to the broadcaster’s reporting in a documentary that aired on Panorama, one of the BBC’s flagship current affairs shows, just days before the U.S. presidential election. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images To even gain a hearing, the U.S. president would first need to prove the documentary was available there. The broadcaster confirmed the Panorama episode was not shown on the global feed of the BBC News Channel, while programs on iPlayer, the BBC’s catchup service, were only available in the U.K.  The Trump team’s letter to the BBC, however, claimed the clip was “widely disseminated throughout various digital mediums” reaching tens of millions of people worldwide — a key contention that would need to be considered by any judge deciding whether the case could be brought.  U.S. libel laws are tougher for claimants given that the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech. In U.S. courts, public figures claiming to have been defamed also have to show the accuser acted with “actual malice.”  The legal meaning doesn’t require animosity or dislike, but instead an intent to spread false information or some action in reckless disregard of the truth — a high burden of proof for Trump’s lawyers.  American libel standards tend to favor publishers more than those in Britain, so much so that in recent decades public figures angry about U.S. news reports have often opted to file suit in the U.K. That trend even prompted a 2010 U.S. law aimed at reining in so-called libel tourism. Yet Trump’s legal team is signaling it will argue that since the full video of Trump’s 2021 speech was widely available to the BBC, the editing itself amounted to reckless disregard and, therefore, actual malice.  BBC Chair Samir Shah apologized on Monday for the “error of judgment” in the edit. | Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images “The BBC’s reckless disregard for the truth underscores the actual malice behind the decision to publish the wrongful content, given the plain falsity of the statements,” his lawyers wrote.  However, a court battle wouldn’t be without risks for Trump. Prateek Swaika, a U.K.-based partner with Boies Schiller Flexner, said pursuing litigation “could force detailed examination and disclosure in connection” with Trump’s Jan. 6 statements —  potentially creating “more reputational damage than the original edit.”  COULD THE BBC SETTLE?  Trump has a long history of threatening legal action, especially against the press, but has lately had success in reaching out-of-court agreements with media outlets — including, most notably, the U.S. broadcasters ABC and CBS.  Trump’s latest claim is the flipside of his $20 billion suit against CBS’s “60 Minutes” over an interview with then-Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, which Trump claimed was deceptively edited to make Harris look good and therefore amounted to election interference.  CBS settled for $16 million in July, paying into a fund for Trump’s presidential library or charitable causes, though the network admitted no wrongdoing. The settlement came as CBS’ parent company, Paramount, was pursuing a corporate merger that the Trump administration had the power to block — and after Trump publicly said he thought CBS should lose its broadcast license, which is also granted by the federal government. The president doesn’t hold that same sway over the BBC, though the organization does have some U.S.-based commercial operations. Some news organizations have also opted to fight rather than settle past Trump claims, including CNN, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Some news organizations have opted to fight rather than settle past Trump claims, including CNN, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images “Litigation is always a commercial decision and it’s a reputational decision,” said Coleman, suggesting settlement talks may look appealing compared to fighting a case that could “hang over the heads of the BBC for many, many years, like a dark cloud.”  COULD THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT STEP IN?  Despite the BBC’s standing as a state broadcaster, the Labour government has so far taken a hands-off approach, perhaps unsurprisingly given Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s ongoing efforts to woo Trump on trade. No. 10 said on Tuesday that the lawsuit threat was a matter for the BBC, though Starmer subsequently reiterated his support for it generally. “I believe in a strong and independent BBC,” Starmer said at prime minister’s questions Wednesday. “Some would rather the BBC didn’t exist … I’m not one of them.” Perhaps eager to stay in Trump’s good books, the PM’s ministers have also avoided attacking the president and instead walked a diplomatic tightrope by praising the BBC in more general terms. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy on Tuesday reiterated the government’s vision of the BBC as a tool of soft power. The BBC documentary did not include a section where Trump called for supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” | Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images “At a time when the line between fact and opinion, and between news and polemic, is being dangerously blurred, the BBC stands apart,” Nandy told MPs Tuesday. “It is a light on the hill for people here and across the world.”  WHO WOULD FUND ANY PAYOUT?  The BBC is funded by the country’s license fee, which requires any household that has a TV or uses BBC iPlayer to pay £174.50 a year (some people are exempt from paying). In the year ending March 2025, this accounted for £3.8 billion of the corporation’s overall £5.9 billion in income. The remaining £2 billion came from activities including commercial ventures. Any licence fee revenue that funded a settlement with Trump would likely go down very poorly as a political matter, given looming tax increases in the U.K. as well as the U.S. president’s significant unpopularity with British voters. The corporation lost a €100,000 (£88,000) libel case earlier this year against former Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams after a Dublin jury found the broadcaster falsely connected him to a 2006 Irish Republican Army killing, showing there is a precedent for politicians winning cases.  Responding to a question as to whether license fee payers would fund any legal sum, Starmer said Wednesday: “Where mistakes are made, they do need to get their house in order and the BBC must uphold the highest standards, be accountable and correct errors quickly.” Singer Cliff Richard also received £210,000 in damages and around £2 million in legal costs from the BBC in 2019 over a privacy case, though those payments were within the scope of its legal insurance. MIGHT AN ALTERNATIVE PAYMENT WORK?  The BBC has paid damages to a foreign head of state before, including compensating then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in 2019 for an incorrect report. But Trump technically faces rules on accepting foreign payments. There’s every chance that a settlement to Trump could pass through another vehicle, as the with the CBS agreement. ABC’s settlement involved $15 million to a Trump-related foundation alongside $1 million for his legal fees.  Trump’s former attorney Alan Dershowitz suggested just that on Tuesday, saying if the corporation made a “substantial” contribution to a charity “that’s relevant to the president might put this thing behind them.” 

The looming Supreme Court showdown over President Donald Trump’s tariffs amounts to an epic clash between two of the most deeply ingrained tenets of the conservative legal movement. The first is that presidents need and are entitled to extreme deference on matters of national security and foreign policy. That precept suggests the six conservative justices may be willing to uphold Trump’s unprecedented move to bypass Congress and unilaterally impose sweeping global tariffs. On the other hand, an indisputable hallmark of the Roberts court is a deep mistrust for government meddling in the free market. That ideological predilection, which has fueled a slew of pro-business, anti-regulatory rulings, could prompt the court’s conservatives to view Trump’s tariffs more skeptically than they view many of his other, non-economic policies. “I think that some of the justices that matter are going to feel a bit torn,” said Jonathan Adler, a professor at William and Mary Law School. “What’s interesting here is that this case requires some of the conservative justices to confront a conflict between different strands of their own jurisprudence.” In the case set for oral arguments Wednesday, Trump is asking the justices to overturn lower-court decisions that declared many of the tariffs — the centerpiece of Trump’s economic agenda — an illegal overreach. The lower courts found that a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, did not authorize the president to impose such broad tariffs. FOREIGN RELATIONS AND THE KAVANAUGH FACTOR Lurking just below the surface in the case is a key dynamic: Should Trump’s tariffs be treated as a garden-variety economic policy, or are they a core part of the president’s management of international relations and national security? “How this case comes out will depend in large part on what the frame or the lens on it is,” said Vikram Amar, a law professor at the University of California at Davis. “Is this a case about unbridled, unauthorized — at least not explicitly authorized — broad executive authority, or is this a case about presidential ability to discharge foreign affairs and national security responsibilities?” That question could be most acute for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose public appearances frequently include an account of his searing experiences working in President George W. Bush’s White House after 9/11. Kavanaugh is often the high court’s most outspoken voice for the president’s need for flexibility and dexterity in response to international challenges. But he is also highly skeptical of government power in the economic realm. A year before Trump nominated him to the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh declared his fealty to the conservative theory known as the “major questions doctrine” — the notion that courts should block executive branch actions of widespread impact when their legal basis is ambiguous. Staking out his position in a case involving net neutrality rules, Kavanaugh said he saw the doctrine applying to “a narrow class of cases involving major agency rules of great economic and political significance.” “If an agency wants to exercise expansive regulatory authority over some major social or economic activity … an ambiguous grant of statutory authority is not enough,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Congress must clearly authorize an agency to take such a major regulatory action.” Under this sort of test, the widespread tariffs Trump implemented would be on shaky legal ground because the 1977 law at issue, known as IEEPA, does not expressly empower the president to enact tariffs. However, just four months ago, Kavanaugh emphasized that the court’s skepticism about legally dubious executive branch actions has an important limit. “The major questions canon has not been applied by this Court in the national security or foreign policy contexts. … The canon does not translate to those contexts because of the nature of Presidential decisionmaking in response to ever-changing national security threats and diplomatic challenges,” he wrote in a solo concurring opinion in a case about funding to improve internet and phone service for low-income and rural Americans. TRUMP CLAIMS TARIFF POWER Trump announced his sweeping, worldwide “Liberation Day” tariffs in April, hitting nearly every country in the world with a minimum 10 percent tariff and including rates reaching 50 percent on some nations. The president claimed the authority to impose the tariffs under IEEPA, which Congress passed to try to rein in broader powers granted by a predecessor statute. IEEPA gives the president the right to “regulate … importation” of items from foreign countries during a presidentially declared national emergency. It’s fairly clear that in such an emergency the president has the power to put an embargo on foreign individuals or particular foreign countries. The administration contends that broader power to regulate and prohibit imports implies the related power to impose import taxes better known as tariffs, but opponents of Trump’s move say Congress knew how to confer that power on the president if it wanted to do so. “Nowhere does it say tariffs, taxes, duties,” noted Elizabeth Goitein, who studies emergency powers at New York University’s Brennan Center. A federal appeals court ruled, 7-4, in August that Trump’s broad tariffs exceeded his authority under IEEPA. However, the Federal Circuit’s majority stopped short of saying the law could never be used to impose more targeted tariffs. WATCHING THE COURT’S CENTER Many experts consider Kavanaugh likely to lean toward blessing the tariffs, although his vote isn’t a sure thing. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch are thought by court watchers to be even more likely to uphold the tariffs. Assuming the three liberal justices vote against the administration, that leaves Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett in play, although under that scenario both Roberts and Barrett would have to join the liberals to assemble enough votes to strike down the tariffs. “The center of the court is going to be especially interesting to watch,” Roman Martinez, a former law clerk to Kavanaugh and Roberts, said during a discussion at Georgetown Law. “I think this case will probably split the conservatives,” said Cary Coglianese, a University of Pennsylvania law school professor who specializes in administrative law and regulatory processes. Among the liberal justices, the Trump administration’s strongest prospect for support in the tariffs cases may be Obama appointee Elena Kagan. Like Kavanaugh, she saw presidential decisionmaking up close in White House jobs, although hers were under President Bill Clinton.thathis travel ban policy. That seemed to show deference to the president’s need for flexibility, although she joined the court’s liberal wing in dissent six months later when the court issued a final, 5-4 ruling upholding the travel ban. ‘THE STAKES IN THIS CASE COULD NOT BE HIGHER’ Some court watchers say the conservative justices, including Trump’s three high court appointees, could be hesitant to rule against Trump on an issue so central to his policy agenda. Just as many saw politics at work in the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision to leave a key part of President Barack Obama’s signature health care law in place, the justices might decide not to provoke the political fury that would be unleashed by striking down the tariffs. “This, along with ICE and immigration … is the paramount domestic policy initiative of this president,” said Donald Verrilli, who served as solicitor general under Obama. “One way of thinking about this is that the justices who are going to determine the outcome of this case feel like they need a really pretty strong case on the legal merits before they’re going to decide to cross swords with the president.” The tariffs case also comes to the court amid an extraordinary winning streak for Trump and his policies. Since January, Trump has brought an unprecedented number of emergency appeals to the justices and has prevailed in more than 20 of them, freeing his hand to gut foreign aid, fire leaders of federal agencies, and strip hundreds of thousands of immigrants of deportation protections. Trump and his administration have sought to keep that streak going by painting a potential defeat for his tariff policy as so cataclysmic that the justices would be ill-advised to take that risk. Trump warned on the eve of the arguments that the case “is, literally, LIFE OR DEATH for our Country.” Trump’s lawyers have also pushed the rhetorical envelope. The Trump administration’s formal plea to the high court to take up the tariff case turned heads in the legal community by including language so hyperbolic that it seemed designed to remind the justices of the intense retort they are certain to receive from Trump if they rule against him. “The stakes in this case could not be higher,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote. “The President and his Cabinet officials have determined that the tariffs are promoting peace and unprecedented economic prosperity, and that the denial of tariff authority would expose our nation to trade retaliation without effective defenses and thrust America back to the brink of economic catastrophe.” THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EFFECT That sort of apocalyptic verbiage is a rarity in Justice Department filings with the high court. While the justices will likely be reluctant to mount a direct challenge to those sorts of presidential predictions, the administration’s sky-is-falling claims could actually prompt some of the court’s conservatives to give Trump less running room, lawyers who practice before the court said. Even as the legal challenges have been playing out, Trump has raised doubts about whether the tariffs his imposed are a response to bona fide emergencies or more mundane concerns. Last month, Trump declared he was imposing an additional 10 percent tariff on Canada to express his irritation at a TV advertisement the province of Ontario aired showcasing President Ronald Reagan’s opposition to tariffs. “If the justices think that these assertions are kind of pretextual, I think that could shape their thinking about the other more purely legal issues in the case,” said Martinez, who authored an amicus brief for the Chamber of Commerce opposing the tariffs. “It could … bring into sharp relief in their eyes the dangers of giving the president this broad authority to impose tariffs. So, that’s a dynamic that could play out, as well.” Another factor undercutting the potential political blowback the court could receive from voiding the Trump tariffs: Most of the Republican establishment is profoundly unenthusiastic about them. Even some Trump backers might quietly celebrate a court ruling preventing the kind of broad-based tariffs the president announced in April. For decades, liberals and many legal academics have argued that the Roberts court is beholden to business interests, delivering a broad blow to the power of federal government agencies to regulate businesses, reining in federal authority to prevent development on environmental grounds and weakening federal enforcement of securities laws. If one subscribes to the notion that the opinions of some billionaires hold outsized sway at the court, well-heeled business people and investors have been sharply negative about the tariffs, although the markets have shrugged them off at least for now. “Tariffs are taxes,” one of many Wall Street Journal editorials skewering Trump’s tariffs declared. “If he can impose a tax on any imported product any time he wants, he really has the power of a king.” In short, while a ruling against the tariffs would surely infuriate Trump, it wouldn’t do much if anything to hurt the conservative justices’ standing in their legal, political and social circles. A RULING AGAINST HIM WOULDN’T LEAVE TRUMP WITHOUT TOOLS If the justices are looking for some sort of middle ground on tariffs or are divided in a way that makes an up-or-down ruling on Trump’s powers infeasible, they have a couple of options. The court could reject Trump’s broadest and most extreme tariffs, while highlighting his options under laws other than IEEPA. Many legal experts have pointed to powers Congress gave the president in 1974 to put quotas on imports and impose tariffs of up to 15 percent “to deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits,” a concept that trade specialists say encompasses trade deficits. Those experts argue that Congress’ decision to pass that law, known as the Trade Act, undercuts Trump’s arguments that he should be able to use IEEPA to address the trade deficit problem. However, the Trade Act comes with clear limits, declaring that those tariffs and trade restrictions must be “temporary” and last no longer than five months, unless Congress extends them. That may not represent enough of a cudgel for the Trump administration to use in talks with foreign countries in an effort to get them to agree to longer-lasting trade deals. Another concession the Supreme Court could offer Trump is to allow some tariffs involved in the legal fight to remain in effect. Part of the battle is over tariffs he imposed on Canada and China over trafficking in fentanyl and drug precursors into the U.S. and on Mexico to address those problems as well as migration and human trafficking. A ruling upholding those tariffs, but striking down the more global import taxes linked to trade deficits, would allow Trump to claim a partial win but probably won’t insulate the justices from a presidential rebuke. THE OPTICS OF TURNABOUT Despite the efforts some justices may make to distinguish the worldwide tariffs from other policies federal courts have blocked under the major questions doctrine, if the court allows Trump’s tariffs, many politicians and commentators are likely to accuse the justices of a double-standard. Exhibit No. 1 in this argument will be the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down one of President Joe Biden’s signature policies: his student debt relief plan. That 6-3 decision, wielding the doctrine to invalidate student debt forgiveness, was handed down by the same nine justices over two years ago. “It’s arguably quite analogous,” Goitein said. “Will the Supreme Court act consistently? Of course, the justices might say in a ruling upholding the Trump tariffs that they are pivoting based on legal substance and not politics. But for a court that many members of the public already view skeptically, the result may look partisan. “This will be a true test of the Supreme Court in many, many ways,” Goitein said. Erica Orden contributed to this report.

From the SWAP: A Secret History of the New Cold War by Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson. Copyright © 2025 by Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson. Published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. In the third week of March 2023, Vladimir Putin dialed onto a video call and reached for a winning tactic he had been honing since his first weeks as president. He approved the arrest of another American. By then, Russia’s president was running the world’s largest landmass from a series of elaborately constructed, identical conference rooms. As far as the CIA could tell, there were at least three of them across Russia, each custom-built and furnished to the exact same specifications, down to the precise positioning of a presidential pencil holder, engraved with a double-headed eagle, the state symbol tracing back five centuries, on the lacquered wooden desk. Neither the 10 perfectly sharpened pencils inside nor any other detail in the windowless rooms, with their beige-paneled walls and a decor of corporate efficiency, offered a clue to Putin’s true location. Russia’s president refused to use a cell phone and rarely used the internet. Instead, he conducted meetings through the glow of a large screen monitor, perched on a stand rolled in on wheels. The grim-faced officials flickering onto the screen, many of whom had spent decades in his close company, often were not aware from which of the country’s 11 time zones their commander in chief was calling. Putin’s staff sometimes announced he was leaving one city for another, then dispatched an empty motorcade to the airport and a decoy plane before he appeared on a videoconference, pretending to be somewhere he was not. From these Zoom-era bunkers, he had been governing a country at war, issuing orders to front-line commanders in Ukraine, and tightening restrictions at home. Engineers from the Presidential Communications Directorate had been sending truckloads of equipment across Russia to sustain the routine they called Special Comms, to encrypt the calls of “the boss.” The computers on his desks remained strictly air-gapped, or unconnected to the web. Some engineers joked nervously about the “information cocoon” the president was operating in. But even from this isolation, the president could still leverage an asymmetric advantage against the country his circle called their “main enemy.” One of the spy chiefs on the call was proposing an escalation against America. Tall, mustachioed, and unsmiling, Major General Vladislav Menschikov ranked among one of the siloviki, or “men of strength” from the security services who had risen in Putin’s slipstream. The president trusted him enough to run Russia’s nuclear bunkers and he played ice hockey with his deputies. Few people outside a small circle of Kremlinologists had heard of Menschikov, head of the First Service of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor to the KGB. But everybody in America had watched the spectacular operation he had pulled off just a few months earlier. An elite spy agency under his command orchestrated the arrest of an American basketball champion, Brittney Griner. Hollywood stars and NBA legends including Steph Curry and LeBron James demanded President Joe Biden ensure her swift return, wearing “We Are BG” shirts on court. Menschikov helped oversee her exchange in a prisoner swap for Viktor Bout, an infamous Russian arms dealer nicknamed “the Merchant of Death,” serving 25 years in an Illinois penitentiary. This account is based on interviews with former and current Russian, U.S. and European intelligence officials, including those who have personally been on a video call with Putin, and the recollections of an officer in the Russian leader’s Presidential Communications Directorate, whose account of Putin’s conference call routine matched publicly available information. Those sources were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive details of the president’s calls. Trading a notorious gunrunner for a basketball player was a stunning example of Russia’s advantage in “hostage diplomacy,” a form of statecraft that died with the Cold War only for Putin to resurrect it. In penal colonies across Russia, Menschikov’s subordinates were holding still more Americans, ready to swap for the right price. They included a former Marine, mistaken for an intelligence officer, who had come to Moscow for a wedding, and a high school history teacher whose students had included the CIA director’s daughter, caught in the airport carrying medical marijuana. Disappointingly, neither of their ordeals had yet to bring the desired offer from Washington. Menschikov’s proposal was to cross a threshold Moscow hadn’t breached since the Cold War and jail an American journalist for espionage. A young reporter from New Jersey — our Wall Street Journal colleague and friend Evan Gershkovich — was flying from Moscow to Yekaterinburg to report on the increased output of a local tank factory. If the operation went to plan, the reporter could be exchanged for the prisoner Putin referred to as “a patriot,” an FSB officer serving a life sentence in Germany for gunning down one of Russia’s enemies in front of a Berlin coffee shop called All You Need Is Love. The murderer had told the police nothing, not even his name. From the moment Putin gave his assent, a new round of the game of human poker would begin that would see a cavalcade of spies, diplomats and wannabe mediators including oligarchs, academy award-winning filmmakers and celebrities seek to help inch a trade towards fruition. The unlikely combination of Hillary Clinton and Tucker Carlson would both step in to advance talks, alongside the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who would wrestle with whether to fly to Moscow to personally petition Putin. All told, CIA officers would fly thousands of miles to orchestrate a deal that would come to encompass 24 prisoners. On the Russian side: hackers, smugglers, spies and Vadim Krasikov, the murderer Putin had set out to free were all released. In return, the U.S. and its allies were able to free dissidents, westerners serving draconian sentences, former Marine Paul Whelan, and journalists that included the Washington Post’s Vladimir Kara-Murza, Radio Free Europe’s Alsu Kurmasheva, and our newspaper’s Gershkovich. Looking back, what is remarkable is how well it all went for the autocrat in the Kremlin, who would manage to outplay his fifth U.S. president in a contest of taking and trading prisoners once plied by the KGB he joined in his youth. An adage goes that Russia, in the 21st century, has played a poor hand well. The unbelievable events that followed also raise the question of how much blind luck — and America’s own vulnerabilities — have favored the man in the “information cocoon.” The prisoner game continues even under President Donald Trump, who in his second term’s opening months conducted two swaps with Putin, then in May discussed the prospect of an even larger trade. It is a lesser-known item of the Russian president’s biography that he grabbed his first American bargaining chip just eight days after his March 2000 election, when the FSB arrested a former naval officer, Edmond Pope, on espionage charges. It took a phone call from Bill Clinton for the youthful Putin to pardon Pope, an act of swift clemency he would never repeat. Twenty-three years later, on the videoconference call with General Menschikov, Putin was in a far less accommodating mood. He wanted to force a trade to bring back the FSB hitman he privately called “the patriot” — he’d been so close to Krasikov, they’d fired rounds together on the shooting range. Some CIA analysts believed he was Putin’s personal bodyguard. In the previous months, before he approved Gershkovich’s arrest, three Russian spy chiefs asked the CIA if they could trade Krasikov, only to hear that rescuing a Russian assassin from a German jail was a delusional request of the United States. Days before the call, one of Putin’s aides phoned CIA Director Bill Burns and asked once more for good measure and was told, again, the entire idea was beyond the pale. Menschikov’s officers would test that point of principle. His men would arrest the reporter, once he arrived in Yekaterinburg. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It was just after 1 p.m. in The Wall Street Journal’s small security office in New Jersey, and Gershkovich’s tracking app was no longer pinging. The small team of analysts monitoring signals from reporters deployed across the front lines of Ukraine and other global trouble spots had noticed his phone was offline, but there was no need to raise an immediate alarm. Yekaterinburg, where the Russia correspondent was reporting, was east of the Ural Mountains, a thousand miles from the artillery and missile barrages pummeling neighboring Ukraine. Journal staff regularly switched off their phones, slipped beyond the reach of cell service, or just ran out of battery. The security team made a note in the log. It was probably nothing. A text came in to the Journal’s security manager. “Have you been in touch with Evan?” The security manager had spent the day monitoring reporters near the Ukrainian front lines, or others in Kyiv who’d taken shelter during a missile bombardment. But he noticed Gershkovich had missed two check-ins and was ordering the New Jersey team to keep trying him. “Shit,” he texted back, then fired off a message to senior editors. The Journal’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan looked out through a cold March sky onto Sixth Avenue. Within minutes, staff gathering in the 45-story News Corporation Building or dialing in from Europe were scrambling to reach contacts and piece together what was happening in Russia. The paper’s foreign correspondents with experience in Moscow were pivoting from finalizing stories to calling sources who could locate their colleague. One reached a taxi driver in Yekaterinburg and urged him to stop by the apartment where Gershkovich was staying. The chauffeur called back minutes later, saying he’d found only dark windows, the curtains still open. “Let’s hope for the best,” he said. Though there were still no news reports on Gershkovich’s disappearance nor official comment from Russia’s government, the data points suggested something had gone badly wrong. The Journal scheduled a call with the Russian ambassador in Washington but when the hour came was told, “He is unfortunately not available.” The problem reached the new editor- in-chief, Emma Tucker, who listened quietly before responding in a voice laced with dread. “I understand. Now what do we do?” Only eight weeks into the job — in a Manhattan apartment so new it was furnished with a only mattress on the floor — Tucker was still trying to understand the Journal’s global org chart, and had met Gershkovich just once, in the paper’s U.K. office. Now she was corralling editors, lawyersand foreign correspondents from Dubai to London onto conference calls to figure out how to find him. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and Russia specialist on her staff made a grim prediction. If the FSB had him, it wasn’t going to be a short ordeal: “He’s going to spend his 30s in prison.” And when editors finally located the Journal’s publisher to inform him of what was going on, they hoped it wasn’t an omen. Almar Latour was touring Robben Island, the prison off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela served 18 of his 27 years of incarceration. There was a reporter nobody mentioned, but whose face was engraved into a plaque on the newsroom wall. Latour had once sat next to Daniel “Danny” Pearl, the paper’s intrepid and gregarious South Asia correspondent. In 2002, the 38-year-old was lured into an interview that turned out to be his own abduction, and was beheaded on camera by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a mastermind of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — leaving behind a pregnant wife and a newsroom left to report the murder of their friend. Paul Beckett, the Washington bureau chief and one of the last reporters to see Pearl alive, had thought of him immediately. He managed to get Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the phone. America’s top diplomat knew exactly who Evan was; just that morning he had emailed fellow administration officials the reporter’s latest front-page article, detailing how and where Western sanctions were exacting long-term damage on Russia’s economy. It was an example, Blinken told his office, of the great reporting still being done in Russia. “Terrible situation,” Blinken told Beckett, before adding a promise America would pay a steep price to keep: “We will get him back.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Biden White House’s first move after learning of Gershkovich’s arrest was to call the Kremlin — an attempt to bypass the FSB. The arrest of an American reporter was a major escalation and if National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan could reach Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy specialist, Sullivan hoped he could convince Ushakov to step back from the brink. At best, he assessed his odds of success at 10 percent, but this was a crisis that seemed likely to either be resolved with a quick call or drag on for who knows how long, and at what cost. “We’ve got a big problem,” Sullivan told Ushakov. “We’ve got to resolve this.” The answer that came back was swift and unambiguous. “This is a legal process,” Ushakov said. There would be no presidential clemency — only a trial, and if Washington wanted a prisoner trade, they were going to have to arrange it through what the Russians called “the special channel.” In other words, the CIA would have to talk to the FSB. Sullivan hung up, and his team braced themselves to brief the Journal: the newspaper was going to need to be patient. The White House was trapped in a rigged game, facing the crude asymmetry between the U.S. and Russia, whose leader, in power for a quarter-century, could simply order foreigners plucked from their hotel rooms and sentenced to decades on spurious charges. Griner, the basketball champion, hadn’t even returned to the basketball court in the three months since her exchange for “the Merchant of Death,” yet already, the Russians had scooped up another high-profile chip. The CIA and its European allies had been quietly trying to fight back in this game of human poker. They had spent enormous energy tracking and rounding up the Russians Putin valued most: deep-cover spies, or “illegals,” who spent years building false lives undercover, taking on foreign mannerisms and tongues. Norwegian police, with U.S. help, had nabbed an agent for Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, posing as a Brazilian arctic security professor in Norway’s far north. Poland had arrested a Spanish-Russian freelance journalist: His iCloud held the reports he’d filed for the GRU, on the women — dissidents and journalists — he’d wooed across Central and Eastern Europe. It had taken the spy service of the Alpine nation of Slovenia, known as Owl, nearly a year to find, then jail, a carefully hidden pair of married spies, pretending to be Argentines running an art gallery — sleeper agents working for Moscow’s SVR foreign intelligence agency. Not even their Buenos Aires-born children, who they spoke to in fluent Spanish, knew their parents’ true nationality or calling. Yet for all that work, none of these prisoners worked for the agency that mattered most in Russia and ran the “special channel” — the FSB. Putin himself had once run Russia’s primary intelligence agency, and now it was in the hands of his siloviki, the security men he’d known for decades who included Menschikov. There was, the CIA knew, only one prisoner the FSB wanted back: Krasikov, the FSB officer serving life in a German prison. America was stuck. Every stick it could beat Russia with was already being wielded. The world’s financial superpower was drowning Putin’s elite in sanctions, and almost every week Sullivan authorized another carefully designed shipment of weaponry to the battlegrounds of Ukraine, whose government complained bitterly it was being given just enough to perpetuate a war, not enough to win. And yet America’s government had to worry about the conflict tipping into a nuclear exchange. What else is there in our toolbag? Sullivan asked himself. We’re doing everything we can. But the game was rigged. Which is why Putin kept playing it.