We had another one of those nights that reminds you why the timing of these conversations matters. Before I sat down to talk with Glenn Kirschner, Kyiv had already been through drone attacks, air raid sirens, and a missile barrage that started after midnight with no warning at all. Two people were killed. That’s not a preamble — that’s the baseline I was working from when I asked Glenn to help me bridge two realities that don’t often get put side by side: the country I live in, which is fighting an existential war and still finds a way to hold its own officials accountable, and the country I’m from, which isn’t at war and increasingly can’t.
Yermak, and the accountability gap
On May 14th, Andriy Yermak — the head of the Ukrainian presidential office and one of Volodymyr Zelensky’s closest aides — was arrested. He’s still being held. It’s not a comfortable story for Ukraine to tell about itself in the middle of a war, and it isn’t being told quietly. But it’s being told, and that’s the point I wanted to put in front of Glenn: a country fighting for its physical survival is still willing to prosecute its own senior officials. The United States, which is not fighting for its survival in any comparable sense, has yet to see a notable federal figure face the same kind of reckoning.
Glenn — a 30-year federal prosecutor and former chief of the Homicide Section for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in DC, now running the Team Justice community — didn’t flinch from the comparison. His read is that the U.S. is in a genuine crisis of the rule of law, with a president he describes bluntly as corrupt and criminal, aided by cabinet officials violating both statute and constitution, and an effort underway to install a loyalist — Todd Blanche — as a permanent, compliant Attorney General. Glenn’s framing: this isn’t hyperbole anymore. It’s a fight to keep the republic, and it will take everyone engaged in it, not just the people whose job it used to be.
The Antifa case, and what conspiracy law can and can’t do
We spent real time on the recent Antifa-linked sentencing out of Texas, because it’s a useful test case for what happens when a legal tool built for actual criminal conspiracies gets stretched to cover protest activity. Glenn’s assessment, offered with the caveat that he hadn’t reviewed the full trial record: conspiracy law is a powerful and legitimate prosecutorial tool when it’s aimed at people actually conspiring to commit crimes. It becomes something else when it’s aimed at people banding together to protest government overreach.
The mechanics matter here. Once even one alleged co-conspirator pleads guilty or flips and testifies, the whole conspiracy theory gains legitimacy in front of a jury — and the reach of co-conspirator liability is long. Glenn’s bank-robbery example makes the point cleanly: the getaway driver who never fired a shot is on the hook for the murder committed inside the bank, because that’s how conspiracy liability works. That’s a legitimate legal doctrine. Applied loosely to political protest, it becomes something closer to a chilling effect with a legal justification attached — and Glenn flagged that the judge in this particular case is a Federalist Society appointee with a track record of being reversed on appeal, which may not be the last word on the matter.
I brought my own frame to that conversation too: 12 years of counterterrorism analysis means I’m not interested in defending anyone who crosses the line into violence, on any side of the political spectrum. What concerns me is what isn’t getting attention while federal agents are running knock-and-talks over social media posts. Glenn’s answer, from the prosecutor’s chair: legitimate knock-and-talks require some actual predicate — reasonable suspicion, a direct and unambiguous threat. Scorched-earth criticism of government officials, on its own, doesn’t meet that bar. What we’re watching now, in his view, is law enforcement being deployed for reasons that have nothing to do with that standard.
Where the FBI’s attention actually is — and isn’t
One of the sharper points in the conversation was about opportunity cost. Glenn’s estimate: roughly a thousand FBI agents have reportedly been pulled toward searching for Donald Trump’s name in the Epstein files. Every one of those agents is an agent not working public corruption, financial crime, civil rights enforcement, environmental crime, or — the one that lands hardest — child trafficking cases. That’s not an abstract tradeoff. It’s a direct answer to the question of what accountability costs when it’s selectively applied.
Hegseth, unlawful orders, and the JAG standard
We moved from Washington’s legal apparatus to its military one, and this is where Glenn’s background as a JAG officer came in. His concern centers on Pete Hegseth: the casual invocation of the laws of war, the retaliation against military officers — Senator Mark Kelly among them — for accurately restating what the Uniform Code of Military Justice already requires: that service members must disobey unlawful orders. Glenn’s point was pointed — if military leadership won’t enforce that duty now, that’s a failure that will need to be reckoned with later, the same way Nixon-era and post-January-6th accountability failures still haven’t been fully reckoned with.
I brought the Ukrainian comparison back in here, because it’s the clearest illustration I have of the difference in standards. Ukraine holds a line — imperfectly, but visibly — on how its own soldiers treat captured Russians, including prosecutions when that line is crossed. Zaluzhny, the former commander-in-chief now serving as ambassador to the UK, is respected here precisely because he represents calm, disciplined command — a contrast Glenn and I both noted against images of an American president visibly checked out in public, and a Secretary of Defense building bunkers rather than holding lines.
The corruption model, and why it matters beyond Ukraine
I came to Ukraine as someone who studies extremism and disinformation, not corruption specifically. But “corruption” is the word you hear constantly here, and eventually you have to understand what it means in this context. The clearest frame I’ve found is the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index — a scorecard the world’s largest investors actually use to decide where capital is safe to deploy. Ukraine’s score has been climbing. The United States’ has been falling, tracking alongside countries like Hungary and Bulgaria. Russia sits at the bottom, and that’s not incidental — it’s the model corruption is dragging other countries toward. Once corruption saturates enough of a society, autocracy becomes the only system that can function inside it. That’s the stake, in Glenn’s words and mine both: not an abstraction about ethics, but a description of what kind of country becomes possible once the guardrails are gone.
Where the war actually stands
We closed on the war itself, at 1,600 days and counting — longer than World War I, approaching World War II. Russia has failed, in that time, to defeat a country that started this fight with a famously corrupt army twelve years ago and has since rebuilt itself into one exporting drone and targeting technology the rest of the world now wants. Casualty rates are climbing, not falling. Strikes on Russian oil infrastructure and cross-border operations like Spiderweb aren’t slowing down — they’re expanding, aimed precisely because Ukraine’s resources are too finite to waste on anything that doesn’t serve a tactical purpose. That discipline — hit only what stops the war, not what would simply feel good — is, in its own way, another form of the same accountability we started the conversation with.
That’s the throughline, in the end. A country under existential threat that still prosecutes its own, still disciplines its own strikes, still holds a line on how it treats prisoners. And a country not under existential threat that is struggling to do any of those things. Glenn’s closing point stands on its own: independent journalism — his, mine, and a lot of people doing this work without corporate backing — isn’t the wave of the future. It’s the wave of the present. Corporate media hasn’t been up to this task. Somebody has to be.
As always it is a great honor to serve our viewers/readers and make sure to support Glenn’s mission and work with him to restore the United States. And I thank you for your support of Independent Journalism.
From Kyiv,
Chris Sampson
