We are just forty contributors away from 4,000 TPM Reader/contributors so far in this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. And we’re hoping to get to the $400,000 threshold today. I’ll try to keep these short. But if you can help us get there that would be quite wonderful. It truly takes about one minute. Click here.

Increasingly over recent months and years I and many others have been arguing that the current Supreme Court is fundamentally corrupt. The venal corruption we’ve seen on display with Justices Thomas and Alito is part of that but far from the most important part. The right-wing conservative majority is both the product of and the embodiment of a deeper corruption: put simply, an organized and successful attempt to pack the Court and, with this power achieved, dispense with any pretense of a consistent theory of jurisprudence to advance far-right and partisan Republican claims and thwart democratic action. And yet just as we’re making the argument we’ve seen a string of decisions in which to varying levels of surprise the Court has turned back novel right-wing power grabs and efforts to advance Republican interests under the cover of law.

So what’s up here? Did we have something wrong?

It won’t surprise you that I don’t think we got anything wrong. But the contrast or disjuncture is great enough that it deserves some explanation. And since I’ve been such a critic I wanted to offer one.

More instances of Stolen (Infrastructure) Valor, now from Republican senators hyping Biden administration spending they voted against. Now it’s broadband grants to states under the Department of Commerce’s Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, which is part of the Biden infrastructure bill. The infrastructure bill did have a non-trivial amount of Republican support. But Senators Cornyn and Tuberville, who are currently hyping it back home, voted against. See here for Cornyn and here for Tuberville.

Got other examples? Please drop us a line at the comments/tips email which is talk (at) talkingpointsmemo (dot) com.

The Times reported overnight, based on U.S. intelligence, that one of the senior Russian generals in Ukraine, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, at least had advanced knowledge of the Wagner Mutiny and may have had some role in planning it. Surovikin is a one-time commander of Russian forces in Ukraine and remains a senior commander in the theater. You can read the details in the piece but I want to focus your attention on something different. This is another example of the Biden administration using selective disclosure of U.S. intelligence as an offensive tool in its cold conflict with Russia.

As I mentioned this morning, we’re entering the final lap in our drive. And we really need to hit our goal. Right now the $400,000 and 4,000 individual contributors milestones are coming into view. Please help us hit these critical milestones as we make our way toward hitting our critical goal for the drive. Especially if you’ve been putting it off, make today the day. Just click right here.

Late Update: Currently at $369,744, hoping we can clear $370,000 momentarily and pass $380,000 tonight. (Yes, I’m trying out for your local PBS station, I guess.)

Latter Update: Now at $372,136 and 3,900 individual TPM Readers contributing.

If you haven’t read it yet, I want to make sure you saw Josh Kovensky’s look at key questions surrounding the Wagner Mutiny. Josh is both a Russian speaker and worked for about three years as a reporter in Ukraine. So, as usual, he brings a wealth of contextual knowledge and insight to making sense of these developments. I wanted to add a few observations to my Sunday afternoon piece on the emerging after-action reports about the Mutiny.

First, in that post I highlighted accounts from two expert observers — Michael Kofman and Tatiana Stanovaya. Both accounts have generally been confirmed, at least in their outlines. But one point that seemed a bit off in Stanovaya’s analysis was the certainty that Prigozhin and his mercenaries would be annihilated when they arrived in Moscow. That didn’t seem quite right, or even entirely consistent with the rest of her analysis. It certainly seems like one likely outcome. But it didn’t seem to comport with the uncertainty of the situation.

We are almost three weeks into this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. We’ve done well so far: We’re at $363,347. But we are at the point in the drive when we need to convert “doing well so far” into actually hitting our goal. And we only have a bit more than a week left to do it. Our goal of $500,000 this year isn’t aspirational or a number pulled out of the air. It’s really necessary to keep us on track this year and into next year. Also, let me remind you that for every contribution, we create community subscriptions for readers who lack financial means or who are registered students. If you’ve been considering it, please take a moment to make a contribution today. I’m ready to get back to just posting about the news and I’m sure you are ready for me to do that too. But first we need to get to our goal to get back to doing what we do and want to do more of. Thank you. Here’s the link.

CNN got a copy of the audio recording noted in the Mar-a-Lago indictment in which Trump shows off highly classified military plans for an attack on Iran to some randoms who were putting together a biography of Mark Meadows. I’m not sure which is more shocking: that he was doing this or that someone was writing a Mark Meadows bio. But however that may be, CNN has the recording. It was from 2021 and the recording was made at Trump’s Bedminster golf club.

Like, I suppose, most people in the world, I’m still trying to make sense of what happened in Russia over the weekend. But what information I’ve been able to gather this morning tells me that this ended very much as a draw. Prigozhin doesn’t seem to be slinking off into obscurity or through a helpfully open window, though the latter could certainly happen at any moment. In fact, he released a message today in which he continued to make the case for his one-day mutiny and actually in a way upped the ante.

With the news that Kevin McCarthy has now switched his focus to impeaching Merrick Garland, I’d draw your attention to last week’s piece on learning to love impeachment.