We have a special briefing on Friday at 1 PM for Inside members. We’ll be talking to Annette Gordon-Reed. Gordon-Reed is one of the country’s preeminent Jefferson scholars and the leading scholar of the Jefferson/Hemings family in all its dimensions. We’re going to talk about that story, Annette’s scholarship and how we do see or should see Jefferson in the light of this history and particularly in the light of the season of iconoclasm we are currently living through after the murder of George Floyd. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. So I hope you’ll join us. An email invitation should be in your inbox.

Yesterday I sat down with Senior Editor David Taintor and Reporter Kate Riga to discuss this week’s news. We talked COVID, COVID relief negotiations and the 2020 elections. If you’re a member watch our conversation right here.

Vice President Mike Pence was speaking directly to the audience he knows best when he went after Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts yesterday.

As I’ve tried to make clear repeatedly, I think an audit of the executive branch after Trump leaves office (whenever that is), is absolutely essential. Equally so, disclosure – a full airing of everything that happened during this corrupt, transgressive era – is a higher priority than punishment or criminal investigations.

1403 COVID deaths were reported in the United States yesterday. That’s roughly 10 times the number of fatalities reported so far in that cataclysmic blast in Beirut and almost four hundred more COVID fatalities than Japan has recorded since January 2020.

While President Trump himself is exempt from the rules of the Hatch Act, it would appear he’s not even trying to adhere to precedent as he vies for a second term.

Let’s be honest: good news on the COVID front is very hard to come by. So let’s note some very limited but still real good news. The post-“reopening” outbreak in the United States – almost entirely a self-inflicted harm – appears to have peaked and is possibly beginning to subside.

There’s a primary election in Kansas today that Republicans are warning could have broad implications on the GOP’s ability to hold the Senate in November.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, we are so locked in the house with Trump, so surrounded by his predation, that the nature and scope of much of his abuse and wrongdoing are only partly visible to us. We all see the constant attacks on vote by mail, the incessant claims that the election will be rigged, that he’ll have to decide at the time whether he’ll accept the verdict of the election. But taken together he is actually depriving the whole nation of the ability to conduct a free and fair election. He is hanging over us as we do the normal work of campaigning and election-ing the possibility he’ll disrupt the process, won’t accept the result or most directly that the whole process won’t end up mattering at all. This in itself is a grave crime against the constitution and the republic.

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As Nieman Lab and a few other local publications have pointed out, at the end of this month, Wyoming will become the first state in the union that doesn’t have a true, daily print newspaper.