As is often the case with Trump crimes and Trump adjacent crimes, it’s easy to get distracted by the cloud of nonsense and not focus on the specifics. A few days ago I wrote up Bart Gellman’s new piece on the insurrection in The Atlantic. The best part of Gellman’s piece is how he captures the time urgency going into January 6th. That was the point of no return that even the coup plotters recognized. They needed to stop that clock. In this boffo story and video of Kanye’s “director of operations” threatening this election worker and trying to force her to admit to a plot the deadline for her to come clean is January 6th.

Here is yet another story from the range of conspiracies and criminal plots that were afoot last winter to overthrow the government of the United States and keep Donald Trump in power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman was one of those innocent bystanders who became the target of death threats and harassment tied to a conspiracy theory that she had helped steal the presidential election in Georgia for Joe Biden.

On January 4th 2021 – two days before the Capitol insurrection – a woman named Trevian Kutti knocked on Freeman’s door and told her she was in danger. If Freeman didn’t confess to the truth of Trump’s election rigging charges within 48 hours unidentified persons would come to her home and Freeman along with members of her family would be sent to jail.

Kutti is a publicist and head of Trevian Worldwide, a PR firm. As of 2018 she is also the “Director of Operations” for Kanye West, a friend and political ally of Trump. (Just before signing on with West Kutti had been PR Director for R Kelly. But she quit that job as sex trafficking and assault accusations piled up.) She was there as West’s employee but only identified herself as the emissary of a “high profile” individual with an urgent message and an offer of help.

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I’ve mentioned in different contexts over recent months that we are reviewing and rethinking and trying to improve how we do our core work. This doesn’t mean departing from the core things about TPM and its mission. But a vital news organization must always be open to change and indeed changing just how it accomplishes its core goals, how it lives its values because the world around us is always changing – the news world, the world of politics, the economics of news, the world of journalism. So this survey is about asking some core questions so we know what brings you to TPM, what you value most, what you’d like to see more or less of. It’s pretty quick. I just took it myself. We’d be in your debt if you’d take just a few moments and fill it out by clicking right here.

OAKLAND is trying to bolster and expand its police force. The city just approved two more police academies as it struggles to attract officers amidst a spike in homicides. Another article looks at community support for Mayor Libby Schaaf’s plan to add 60 new officer’s to the city’s police force. (The SF Chronicle has a paywall.)

A NEW study out of Israel published in The New England Journal of Medicine shows a 90% reduction of mortality among those who received booster at least 5 months after initial vaccination compared to those who had only two shots. Israel uses the Pfizer vaccine almost exclusively.

You’ve probably heard reports that Omicron COVID in South Africa has generally been causing milder forms of the disease. The caution on these reports is that they are early, anecdotal, haven’t given enough time to generate severe outcomes and have been disproportionately among the young. Each of these points remains true. But over the last couple days the data has become sufficiently detailed that it does seem like people presenting with Omicron COVID are relatively less sick than those who presented with Delta at the same point in earlier waves. So, definitely still too early to say for sure but probably too far along to dismiss it as merely anecdotal or just an artifact of distorted early data.

So doesn’t that suggest that Omicron is a milder version of COVID? Here’s why it doesn’t.

Earlier I flagged two studies on Omicron vaccine evasion which were released last night. Now we have an additional study conducted under the auspices of PFIZER/BIONTECH which appear to show complementary results. I say ‘complementary’ because they test a different question but the results appear broadly consistent with those other two studies. I’m told that this study was done in the BioNtech labs and looked at a pseudo-virus version of Omicron against samples from people who received two doses and three doses.

The gist is that protection against Omicron goes down a lot if you’ve just had two doses. But with three doses it’s much higher. The key line is this: “According to the companies’ preliminary data, a third dose provides a similar level of neutralizing antibodies to Omicron as is observed after two doses against wild-type and other variants that emerged before Omicron.”

You’ve probably been hearing that we’re waiting on the first lab studies of the Omicron variant’s transmissibility and immune evasion. Yesterday evening two of the first of those studies came out. Given the urgency of the situation the lead researchers released details immediately on Twitter while also publishing pre-print versions of the data. You can read one of the threads here and the second here.

This is probably obvious to many of you. But Donald Trump’s new ‘Truth Social’ media company, formed with a blank check SPAC vehicle, is essentially an open invitation to foreign bribes and payoffs. It’s no surprise the investor list is secret. The one constant in Trump’s business history is that investors get screwed and he walks away unscathed. Given Trump’s political following a social and media venture seems like it could be quite profitable. But most people can succeed with casinos too. Just not Trump. And those were the days of formal investments, prospectuses, business plans, formal commitments. A SPAC is a blank check. Invest now. Find out what you’re investing in later. No one with big money would invest in such an enterprise with the hope of financial returns.

It looks like Donald Trump put his foot down and told Mark Meadows to stop cooperating with the January 6th committee. Is this an effort to get back into Trump’s good graces after the COVID positive test revelation that had Meadows calling his own book “fake news”? Presumably Meadows can now expect an indictment imminently.

I want to recommend to you this new article in The Atlantic about the Jan 6th insurrection and the preparation for the next one in 2024. It doesn’t contain any big exclusives. If you’ve been following ours and others coverage of the insurrection, the effort to pass new election subverting laws at the state level and the campaign of harassment of local election officials you’ll be broadly familiar with most of it. But I don’t think I’ve seen anyone pull the different moving parts together so effectively, either retrospectively or prospectively.

I have a bit of a quibble with Bart on just how much Trump was methodologically pursuing a clear plan to overturn the election once Biden was declared the victor a few days after election day. But this is mainly a matter of emphasis rather than disputes over detail.