Thursday The New York Times published a retrospective and analysis of the “Durham investigation,” the probe Bill Barr stood up to discredit the earlier Trump/Russia probes and which long served as the shining hope of Trump partisans, the vehicle of a promised vengeance that never arrived. Indeed, Durham’s investigation has lasted almost four years, far longer than any of the various probes it purported to scrutinize. The picture the Times story paints is stark if unsurprising: a politicized, instinctively unethical and deeply corrupt effort which managed to embody in almost cartoonish fashion the story it sought to tell about the original Russia investigation. The one thing a criminal investigation is never supposed to be is one that starts knowing the conclusion it wants to arrive at, brings a heavy dose of political motivation and bends rules and cuts corner to get where it wants to go. That caricature describes the Durham probe to a T. The two cases Durham managed to bring to trial were mainly vehicles for airing tendentious conspiracy theories he couldn’t prove and had no real evidence for. The actual cases were laughed out of court with speedy acquittals. 

Today in Republicans, we find that there seems to be at least signs of a real race for RNC chair, a contest that three-term incumbent Ronna McDaniel has seemed to have locked up. I suspect McDaniel still has the votes. But today Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, most recently seen with his poll numbers falling against ex-President Trump, has told far-right luminary Charlie Kirk that he’s backing Harmeet Dhillon, McDaniel’s top opponent.

“I think we need a change … I think we need to get some new blood in the RNC.”

In general, I’m of the mind that it’s not really “wasting” money to spend a lot in one place when the money is better spent elsewhere. If Dems are burning money on a hopeless race in Kentucky just because they despise Mitch McConnell it doesn’t mean that money was really on offer for a sleeper race in another part of the country. I also think campaign dollars are fairly elastic. That person who’s given candidate A $100 probably has another $100 they can give to candidate B if that other candidate catches their fancy. But TPM Reader HS makes a decent point about a possible bonfire of Dem campaign dollars about to be spent in California.

I don’t think it’s too soon to warn TPM readers away from picking a candidate for the Feinstein seat.  Democratic Party activists are about to waste tens of millions of dollars (hundreds of millions?) on the Porter/Lee/Schiff race that really doesn’t matter, they all would be more than adequate. 

Here’s a tweet thread by Tim Snyder, the Yale history professor whose expertise both on the borderlands between Russia and Germany (Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania et al.) and democracy and authoritarianism have put him at the center of numerous public discussions over the last half dozen years. The thread basically looks at The Long Trump-Russia Story in the context of the arrest of Charles McGonigal, the high-ranking FBI counterintelligence agent.

Are House Republicans going wobbly on debt-ceiling hostage taking?

Roll Call reports that House Republicans are now considering passing a series of short-term “clean” debt-limit suspensions in order to create more time for negotiations with the White House over the debt limit and all the spending cuts House Republicans are demanding.

There’s a lot of jargon here. So let me explain what this means.

The House would pass a series of short term laws “suspending” the debt limit. It wouldn’t create a higher debt ceiling but empower the Treasury to simply ignore the debt limit for a period of time. The point is that the crisis seems to be coming sooner than House Republicans want. Generally, the side that wants to free up more time for “negotiations” isn’t on the winning side of the engagement.

Ginni Thomas’ testimony before the Jan. 6 Committee kind of got buried in the avalanche of material the committee released before the end of the last Congress. But it deserves a closer look and Frank Wilkinson takes that deep dive right here. Fascinating stuff. Check it out.

There’s always been a strong Wile E. Coyote vibe to George Santos’s arc across the American political landscape. If he just keeps pretending everything’s fine and nothing matters maybe he’ll never fall off the cliff? But on Tuesday he appears to have taken a step toward falling off the cliff.

At the center of the Santos story from the beginning has been the question of how he went from being a chronic deadbeat making $50,000 a year in 2020 to making millions just two years later from his company, The Devolder Organization. He made so much that he could loan his own campaign almost three-quarters of a million dollars. Now finally we may have an answer. That money he loaned his campaign? Well, it wasn’t actually his money.

Just to note that at that hearing today in Atlanta, County DA Fanni Willis told the court that the special grand jury which had been investigating Trump’s election meddling in Georgia for months recommended multiple indictments and Willis’s decision on whether to bring those charges is “imminent.”

As you’ve seen, CNN reports that classified documents have now been found at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence. This certainly upends the media narrative of recent weeks and probably spurred a round of guffaws at the White House. But there’s a more important issue here which reporters have done too little to explain for readers. “Classified” material covers a huge range of material, from simple briefing papers that may only barely require classification to Top Secret documents. There’s compartmented information that almost no one can see unless they have a specific need to see it.

I want to draw out a few points I mentioned last night about the arrest of Charles McGonigal. When I first heard about the indictments, I understood them to be one (D.C.) that dealt with events while McGonigal still worked at the FBI and one (New York) that dealt with events after he worked at the FBI. But as I noted last night, it’s not that clear cut. The relationship with Oleg Deripaska and a reputed former Soviet/Russian intelligence officer, Evgeny Fokin, began when McGonigal was still at the FBI.

The New York indictment is elusive about just what it’s suggesting about McGonigal and Fokin in 2018, when the former still worked at the FBI. It is also unclear about whether McGonigal was compromised by a foreign power or was simply building a relationship with Fokin and Deripaska for money he would make after he left the FBI.

Was he compromised by Russia? Or was he just compromised by Deripaska? Needless to say, there’s not necessarily a bright line separating these two scenarios.