Power Up: Trump rift with his own intelligence chiefs widens global opening for Putin

Emboldening Putin: President Trump “seethed” after he watched the highlights of Capitol Hill testimony from his intelligence chiefs on Wednesday morning in which they contradicted pretty much everything he has said on Russia, North Korea, China and ISIS, CNN's Kaitlan Collins reports. Trump, CNN reported, singled out Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats “by name during his morning rant.”

• “The snippets of Coats saying that North Korea had 'halted its provocative behavior related to its WMD program' but was unlikely to 'completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities' angered him,” wrote Collins and Caroline Kelly.
• “Go back to school,” Trump tweeted angrily at “intelligence officials” he deemed “extremely passive and naive,” especially on Iran.
• Fred Fleitz, a former National Security Council official in Trump's White House, told Lou Dobbs that Coats should be fired for “airing intelligence conclusions in public,” report The Post's Shane Harris and John Wagner. “Fleitz said the intelligence community 'has basically evolved into a monster that is second-guessing the president all the time.' In the future, he added, the president should forbid the officials from testifying publicly.”

Bigger stakes: Trump’s private anger and public attacks on his intelligence agencies over their contradictory assessments of foreign threats to the United States spells out what has emboldened Putin to be a bigger player on the world stage. Analysts say Putin is being driven by pragmatism rather than old-school proto-socialist foreign policy of the Soviet era.

• “I think what Putin has seen is certainly that the U.S. is withdrawing,” Angela Stent, the author of the forthcoming book “Putin's World,” told Power Up. “We said we are getting out of Syria and Afghanistan, both decisions which have been greatly praised by the Russians and they see a president with an inconsistent foreign policy who is questioning all of the major alliances we have with Europe and Asia. [Putin] is very cleverly taking advantage of opportunities presented to him by an irresolute U.S.” 
• “Putin understands that there is a disconnect between Trump and how he views the world and what the rest of his executive branch says — and you saw that clearly on display yesterday,” Stent added. “What is new is how China and Russia are now working closer together to undermine U.S. interest against Western democracies.” 
• “I think most of the Russians I talked to are as puzzled by this as anybody else,” Jeffrey Mankof, deputy director and senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies's Russia and Eurasia program, told us. “And I think that the fact that there is this very public disagreement here about what the nature of the Russia challenge is … makes it less likely that the U.S. is going to have a unified vision of what Russia policy should look like, which gives Putin certain opportunities.”

In Venezuela: Putin is spearheading support among U.S. adversaries for embattled President Nicolás Maduro after Russia accused the United States of orchestrating a coup following the Trump administration's officially recognition of opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela's interim president. The arrival of a Russian airplane surprised Venezuela watchers when it landed in Caracas on Monday night, “sparking unproven claims that President Nicolás Maduro’s administration is looking to whisk what’s left of the nation’s depleted gold reserves out of the country,” according to the Associated Press's Joshua Goodman.  

• Military analyst Aleksandr M. Goltz told the New York Times's Neil MacFarquhar that Russia's relationship with Venezuela “mirrored the foreign policy of the old Soviet Union, in which the Kremlin lavished arms and money on any country that barked at Washington.”

• “For Putin, the fight against color revolutions is a principle matter,” said Goltz. “It is not important where they happen, in Syria or Venezuela. Any attempt by local people to get rid of an authoritarian leader is seen by the Russian leadership as a conspiracy, masterminded by foreign intelligence.”

North Korea: Earlier this week, The Post's John Hudson and Ellen Nakashima scooped that the Russians had secretly offered the North Koreans a nuclear power plant in Moscow in exchange for nuclear disarmament.

• “They want to be a player on the peninsula for economic and security reasons,” Ken Gause, director of the adversary analytics program at CNA, a defense think tank, told Hudson and Nakashima. “They have aspirations to build a gas pipeline that extends through North Korea all the way down to South Korea, for example. They share a border with North Korea and want a say in how security in Northeast Asia evolves.”
• “Previous administrations have not welcomed these Russian overtures, but with Trump, you never know because he doesn’t adhere to traditional thinking,” Victor Cha, a former White House staffer, told The Post. 

It's not just North Korea, Venezuela, and Syria: Also part of expanding Russian geopolitical clout in places the U.S. is neglecting, Putin has his sights set on Egypt, Algeria, Uganda, Zimbabwe and a long list of commercial engagements across Africa. 

• “But with the U.S. retreat, there is space for Moscow to be mischievous. It is about optics and, to a certain extent, smoke and mirrors to present itself as a global power,” Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at the Chatham House think-tank in London told the Financial Times's Henry Foy and Natassia Astrasheuskaya. “The Russians are looking for areas where they can unnerve western opponents . . . some of whom are truly shocked at what is happening.”

Bottom line: “Russia has for a long time been arguing that the era of U.S. domination is ending and that creates opportunities for other players,” Mankoff said. “But with the diminution of American supremacy accelerating, there is a bigger Russian push into other parts of the world where at least since end of the Cold War, we haven't been accustomed to seeing much of their presence. North Korea and Venezuela are part of that.” 

RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN... AGAINST MUELLER: In addition to Putin's recent spate of geopolitical moves, the Department of Justice alleged on Wednesday that Russia continued to try and discredit Bob Mueller's investigation "after a pro-Russian Twitter account spread confidential information from a criminal case that special counsel Robert Mueller's team brought against a Russian company for social media conspiracy," CNN's Katelyn Polantz reports. 

• Prosecutors are alleging that some of the confidential information turned over to the Russian company Concord Management and Consulting “accused of funding a social media effort aimed at swaying American voters in 2016" became public "after a now-suspended Twitter user touted that it had a 'Mueller database' and a computer with a Russian IP address published thousands of documents online," Polantz reports. 
• “More than a thousand of those documents were part of the case's evidence collection, and were listed online under labels and folders known only to those involved in the case, the prosecutors said.”

On The Hill

HERE WE GO AGAIN: House Democrats unveiled their opening bid in negotiations to stave off yet another government shutdown on Feb. 15 -- and it doesn't contain money for a physical barrier along the southern border. That's a big problem for Trump, who insists he won't shy away from forcing another shutdown or declaring a national emergency if he doesn't get the $5.7 billion asking price for his signature campaign promise: a wall.

Seventeen lawmakers met yesterday for the first time as part of a conference committee charged with producing a negotiated solution on the immigration issue before government funding runs out again in just over two weeks. Trump tweeted Wednesday that any conference committee that's “not discussing or contemplating a Wall or Physical Barrier, they are Wasting their time!”

• The key quote: “We’ve seen that walls can and will be tunneled under, cut through or scaled,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), according to my colleagues Erica Werner, John Wagner and Mike DeBonis. “We cannot focus on archaic solutions to address this very modern problem. Technology works for securing the border.”
• The problem: Lawmakers insisted they agree more than disagree but “the gap between Trump and congressional Democrats on the fundamental issue of the wall yawned as wide as ever.”
• In fact, the new Democratic proposal represents a "retrenchment" for Democrats who have supported previous spending bills with some money for fencing or other barriers along the border, Erica, John and Mike report.
• Politics: Trump's demands for a wall means it's become “politically toxic” for Democrats to support one, and the party was “emboldened” by the president's surrender without any concessions in the last go round.
• Not the final offer: Asked whether no physical barriers is a non-negotiable for Democrats, House Appropriations Chair Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) said: “At this point, I’m certainly not going to give an answer to that question.”
• Meanwhile, White House legislative affairs director Shahira Knight met with the “Problem Solvers” caucus, some members of whom complained they don't have a clear idea of where Trump would be willing to cede ground, my colleagues report.

THREE KICKS OF A MULE AND YOU'RE OUT: Then there's the Senate. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told GOP chairmen in a meeting yesterday he wants a way out. “We're praying for you. Get this done,” he instructed his negotiators on the conference committee, according to Politico's Burgess Everett. The majority leader was slammed for being AWOL during the last shutdown showdown and is now apparently doing all he can to prevent a redux of what his Republican members viewed as an extremely damaging situation. 

• “The Kentucky Republican viewed the most recent episode as largely out of his control, the product of a clash between Trump and Democratic leaders. But now that the government is reopened, the GOP leader has thrown himself into preventing the next impasse,” Everett reports.
• “McConnell’s even modified his favorite saying that 'there’s no education in the second kick of a mule.' On Tuesday, he revised that number upward to three,” he added.
• “There is a strong desire to get this one behind us,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who called the last shutdown McConnell's “fault.” “There’s a real fatigue.”

ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY: Trump has a tough road ahead, with or without a wall. The Post's Seung Min Kim, Sean Sullivan, and Josh Dawsey lay out some of the ways the Trump administration is facing an increasingly adversarial Congress -- from both parties. 

• “Senior Republicans are warning him away from a national emergency declaration to build a border wall. The top Senate leader is directly rebuking his national ­security policy in Syria and Afghanistan. And Democratic committee chairs are threatening subpoenas for his top officials. For an administration that had largely been accommodated by Republican lawmakers during its first two years, President Trump is facing an increasingly adversarial Congress eager to assert itself on matters of foreign policy and oversight,” the trio reports. 

Outside the Beltway

PILL PROFITEERS: ProPublica's David Armstrong got a hold of secret portions of previously redacted paragraphs in Massachusett's 274-page civil complaint against Purdue Pharma alleging the company apparently "[n]ot content with billions of dollars in profits from the potent painkiller OxyContin...explored expanding into an 'attractive market' fueled by the drug's popularity -- treatment of opioid addiction."  The opioid crisis has resulted in 200,000 overdose deaths related to prescription opioids since 1999, according to Armstrong, a staggering figure that many atttribute to the aggressive marketing campaign around OxyContin:

• “In internal correspondence beginning in 2014, Purdue Pharma executives discussed how the sale of opioids and the treatment of opioid addiction are 'naturally linked' and that the company should expand across 'the pain and addiction spectrum,' according to redacted sections of the lawsuit by the Massachusetts attorney general. A member of the billionaire Sackler family, which founded and controls the privately held company, joined in those discussions and urged staff in an email to give 'immediate attention' to this business opportunity, the complaint alleges," Armstrong writes. 
• “ProPublica reviewed the scores of redacted paragraphs in Massachusetts’ 274-page civil complaint against Purdue, eight Sackler family members, company directors and current and former executives, which alleges that they created the opioid epidemic through illegal deceit,” Armstrong writes. 
• Already public allegations against Purdue and the Sacklers document what prosecutors say are the lengths to which the company and family went to "boost OxyContin sales and burnish the drug's reputation in the fact of increased regulation and growing public awareness of its addictive nature. Concerns about doctors improperly prescribing the drug, and patients becoming addicted, were swept aside in an aggressive effort to drive OxyContin sales ever higher, the complaint alleges.”

The People

The Pew Research Center on Wednesday released its early look at the expected shape of the 2020 electorate. The center's projections show that demographic shifts  make the electorate unique in a few ways: 

• "Nonwhites will account for a third of eligible voters – their largest share ever – driven by long-term increases among certain groups, especially Hispanics. At the same time, one-in-ten eligible voters will be members of Generation Z,  the Americans who will be between the ages 18 and 23 next year. That will occur as Millennials and all other older generations account for a smaller share of eligible voters than they did in 2016," per Pew's Anthony Cillufo and Richard Fry. 
• More: "We project that the 2020 election will mark the first time that Hispanics will be the largest racial or ethnic minority group in the electorate, accounting for just over 13% of eligible voters – slightly more than blacks."
• "This change reflects the gradual but continuous growth in the Hispanic share of eligible voters, up from 9% in the 2008 presidential election and 7% in the 2000 election. The black eligible voter population has grown about as fast as the electorate overall, meaning their share has held constant at about 12% since 2000."

In the Media

SUPPORT, READ, BUY YOUR LOCAL NEWSPAPERS, PEOPLE: New research published in the Journal of Communication has found that the endangered status of local newspapers and journalists contributes to political polarization in the United States, the AP's David Bauder reports. “Researchers reached that conclusion by comparing voting data from 66 communities where newspapers have closed in the past two decades to 77 areas where local newspapers continue to operate.”

• Key findings: “With fewer opportunities to find out about local politicians, citizens are more likely to turn to national sources like cable news and apply their feelings about national politics to people running for the town council or state legislature,” Bauder writes of the study's findings. “The result is much less 'split ticket' voting, or people whose ballot includes votes for people of different parties. In 1992, 37 percent of states with Senate races elected a senator from a different party than the presidential candidate the state supported. In 2016, for the first time in a century, no state did that, the study found."
• “The voting behavior was more polarized, less likely to include split ticket voting, if a newspaper had died in the community,” Johanna Dunaway, a communications professor at Texas A&M University, who conducted the research along with colleagues from Colorado State and Louisiana State universities, told Bauder. 
• Other findings: “'Researchers are only beginning to measure the public impact of such losses. Among the other findings is less voter participation among news-deprived citizens in 'off-year' elections where local offices are decided,'" Penelope Muse Abernathy, a University of North Carolina professor, said. "Another study suggested a link to increased government spending in communities where 'watchdog' journalists have disappeared."