A new poll shows Val Demmings leading Marco Rubio by 4 percentage points. (University of North Florida, Demings 48%, Rubio 44%.) I suspect that this poll is an outlier. But it is actually on trend, with a group of recent polls showing a relatively close race. It’s the first independent poll of the race in a month and the first real known-quantity poll since the beginning of 2022. Given the rightward drift of Florida, I would not be getting my hopes up that this is a Democratic pick up. But it is a strong indication that this is a seat Republicans will have to fight to hold on to. Indeed, I suspect some of retrenchment from races in Arizona and Pennsylvania we mentioned yesterday is to defend seats like these.

The articles that make you feel the best are the ones to be most skeptical of. But with that said, this article in The Guardian certainly brought a smile to my face and satisfied a need for a schadenfreude fix. A federal judge will now decide whether to release some portions of the affidavit in support of the search of Mar-a-Lago. There’s the warrant and the inventory, both of which the target gets to see. It’s the affidavit that lays out why are we doing this; why is it important; what larger schemes are we investigating that requires us to go into this home and look for stuff.

The Times is reporting that Trump Org CFO Allen Weisselberg is nearing a plea deal with prosecutors in Manhattan. But the deal apparently does not include cooperating with the broader investigation into Donald Trump and his business. With a guilty plea and time served Weisselberg will likely spend roughly three months in jail.

Fascinating report here from the Times’ Shane Goldmacher. The national GOP — meaning the top DC party committees and leadership PACs — appears to be significantly ramping back support for Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Blake Masters in Arizona and even Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Here’s the Times story and here’s Goldmacher’s Twitter thread, which I at least found easier to follow.

These stories are always a bit hard to interpret and everyone wants to jump forward with tendentious interpretations. Basically the top Senate party committee canceled a bunch of ad buy reservations in these states. Some of it is an effort to redeploy spending to less regulated parts of the campaign finance ecosystem, away from joint campaigns and hybrid spends. Some of these spending channels require the campaign to put up a minimum percentage of the spend in hard money. But the campaigns themselves are struggling financially. So they can’t afford their part.

Jack Goldsmith has a lengthy discussion at the Lawfare Blog of whether Attorney General Garland was right to seek a search warrant to search and seize records from ex-President Trump’s Florida estate. It is a good discussion, though one might say the very brazenness of Trump’s indifference to the law has a way of rendering precious or quaint any serious and deliberate discussion of potential consequences. Most of Goldsmith’s discussion can be boiled down to this: it all depends on what’s in the documents, just how secret they needed to be and what Trump was planning to do with them. And it’s hard to disagree with that — of course it does. But Goldsmith’s analysis is missing something.

Some interesting and absurd but still noteworthy events overnight. Trump’s representatives, at least for the moment, have settled on a story which is that he had a “standing order” that any and all classified materials he took home with him to the White House residence was “deemed” declassified. So in fact, none of the materials in question are classified and none of it matters. This was announced on Fox as an official statement from Trump’s office by John Solomon, the notorious fake news hustler who is now operating as Trump’s “designated representative” to the National Archives.

We are, we might say, deep in the thick of it. Until recently we heard constantly how there was no accountability for the ex-President, no investigations or prosecutions, of anything tied to the denouement of the Trump presidency, save for the men who actually entered the Capitol complex on January 6th. Now we learn that there are and have been multiple investigations touching on various incidents tied to the end of the Trump presidency. There was a bunch of frothy and nonsensical chatter earlier in the week about how the FBI had just given the presidency back to Donald Trump. This morning the House Freedom Caucus, ground zero of Trumpism and coup plotting, canceled the press conference they had planned to bewail the FBI search of the ex-President’s home. Facts change and you have to react to them.

It is probably best to say that we are back in one of those fugue windows Trump Republicans have, much like January 7th-9th 2021, in which there’s a period of relative silence while a story is devised to explain why something inexplicable and indefensible is in fact awesome and totally fine. They’ll get there.

Federal judge orders DOJ to confer with Trump lawyers and report to him by 3 p.m. tomorrow about how to proceed on releasing the warrant and related documents.

Two significant takeaways from Garland’s presser. Garland personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant and carry out the search. The DOJ is asking the court to unseal portions of the search warrant and the inventory of what was seized in the search.

We’re awaiting a statement from AG Merrick Garland currently scheduled for 2:30 p.m. eastern. Presumably this is about the incident in Cincinnati though officially there’s no word on the subject. But conceivably there will be some reference to the search at Mar-a-Lago if today’s incident appears tied to the Monday search.

Again, this is just speculation: there’s no word about what it’s about.

Late Update: CNN reports that this will be about the Mar-a-Lago search.