(FREE RED HAT: “Impeached. Arrested. Convicted. Shot. Still Standing”)
Writing in near-real-time history, Woodward offers details about Biden’s inner circle that typically wouldn’t be released for decades. However, after covering and documenting 10 administrations, the former Watergate journalist has developed a Rolodex of sources who fed him some of Biden’s most recent frustrations with former President Barack Obama. Among them: He admitted to one advisor that Obama “never took Putin seriously,” citing Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that the Russian president has maintained is part of his country’s original homeland. Obama, working under bipartisan support, leveled sanctions against Russia though ultimately never exercised military might in a bid to stop the invasion.
Biden and his team, in contrast, posited that there was as much as a 50% chance that Putin would use nuclear weapons after invading Ukraine. Publicly, the administration believes the conflict has “weakened” the longtime adversary. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines reported to the White House’s National Security Council this spring that Putin is estimated to have suffered as many as 200,000 military casualties and spent $200 billion on the war, Axios reported.
Complicating matters was the curious bonhomie between Putin and former President Donald Trump. Both strongman leaders praised one another in public remarks, and the Biden-Harris administration claimed without proof that they had spoken as many as seven times since Trump left office. Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, denied that the Republican gave Woodward any special access to his post-office life. “None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true,” he told CNN in a statement.
In his own memoir, President Obama looked back on his tumultuous relationship with Putin, comparing him to a sharp-elbowed political “ward boss” in his native Chicago. On the international stage, the Democrat wrote in 2020, Putin was “like a ward [district] boss, except with nukes and a UN Security Council veto,” the BBC reported. “Putin did, in fact, remind me of the sorts of men who had once run the Chicago machine or Tammany Hall [a New York City political organization] – tough, street-smart, unsentimental characters who knew what they knew, who never moved outside their narrow experiences, and who viewed patronage, bribery, shakedowns, fraud, and occasional violence as legitimate tools of the trade.”
