Editors’ Blog

This morning’s latest on Trump’s seemingly pervasive destruction and theft of government documents and classified material is that White House officials periodically found the toilets in the White House residence clogged with wads of flushed paper, which they believed — reasonably enough! — were government documents the President had tried to destroy. This revelation comes from Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming Trump book “Confidence Man.” Axios has the scoop. Because of course it does. Mike Allen described this as adding “a vivid new dimension to his lapses in preserving government documents,” which struck me as a generous way to describe it.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) stepped in it/spilled it/has soup on her face/etc.

The QAnon congresswoman is known for her various unhinged diatribes, usually packed with some layer of confusing racism or anti-Semitism or Nazism.

Today during an interview with the far-right Real America News outlet, Greene was attempting to comment on Rep. Troy Nehls’ (R-TX) recent bizarre claims that Capitol Hill police took unauthorized photos of his office last fall and that Capitol law enforcement is engaged in some deep state plot to “destroy” him. The Capitol Police pushed back on the allegations saying an officer merely locked the congressman’s office door when it was left wide open during Thanksgiving break. TPM’s Josh Kovensky got a copy of a Capitol Police report and he explains the whole faux-outrage incident in depth here, but essentially Nehls and other far-right lawmakers are seizing on Nehls’ accusations as fodder for their campaign to blame the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Police as they flail to divert blame for the attack away from Trump and his supporters.

Just moments ago the Post reported that the National Archives has asked the Justice Department to investigate ex-President Trump’s handling of White House records and possible violations of the Presidential Records Act. For clarity, the PRA is the post-Watergate statute that makes clear the the work product of the presidency belongs to the American public and not the individual president. As is so often the case, adjudicating Trump’s infractions is paradoxically complicated by their sheer brazenness. I mean, what is there to investigate? The violations have been so open that he seems to be saying with his actions that his actions are okay. Trump for years openly destroyed records covered by the PRA. (His staff reportedly attempted to piece them back together with tape.) Then he absconded with 15 boxes of records that the National Archives had to recover from Mar-a-Lago.

The Times has a piece on the topic we’ve been talking about here in recent days: the escalating battle over “legitimate political discourse” and the January 6th insurrection. They see it primarily as a messaging gaffe. And that is certainly part of the story. The imperative for the RNC was the formal censure of the two dissident House Republicans: Cheney and Kinzinger. That didn’t require a blanket endorsement of the Jan. 6th insurrection, which the label “legitimate political discourse” certainly conferred. That has to go down to Ronna McDaniel’s general ineptitude. But you need to be a really good driver on a twisty road with a lot of black ice. And right now the GOP is on a twisty road with a lot of black ice.

It’s no accident this happened. It happened because Trump is demanding it happen. As we noted yesterday, this is a dance between Trump and the Jan. 6th committee with most elected Republicans caught in between.

Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R) has made quite the name for herself in the far-right, Big Lie corners of the Republican Party in the last year. As a key figure in the state’s phony election “audit,” Rogers knows how to aggressively captivate her audience.

She’s injected herself into several election-overturning causes in recent months. In the waning days of the sketch audit of 2020 election results in Arizona’s Maricopa County, Rogers suggested imprisoning members of the Republican-majority board of supervisors when the county rejected the state Senate’s subpoena for additional election-related materials. The Trumpian state lawmaker has since proposed legislation that would make it easier for the governor’s office to investigate so-called instances of election “fraud,” setting state Republicans up to try to Big Lie their way out of any 2022 disappointments for the party.

Now, she’s getting involved in the Canadian anti-vax trucker protests in Ottawa that have devolved into a reckless display of Big Rig power over the course of the last 12 days with thousands of protesters flooding the area surrounding Ottawa’s Parliament building.

A short time ago, Mitch McConnell was asked whether the Jan. 6th insurrection was “legitimate political discourse” and he responded saying that it was on the contrary a “violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election.”

Video after the jump …

The RNC said crystal clear and out in the open that January 6th was “legitimate political discourse.” The first explanation of how this didn’t mean what it clearly meant was that they somehow only meant the stuff that happened before things got violent and turned into an insurrection. So only the pre-insurrection stuff even though the only reason anyone is investigating January 6th is the violence and insurrection. Now Kevin McCarthy, literally dashing away as Manu Raju asked him the question, is trying another tack. He says the RNC statement about Jan. 6th wasn’t even about January 6th. It was about six members of the RNC who have been subpoenaed by the committee. And they were in Florida on Jan. 6th. And remember it has nothing to do with Jan. 6th. Which RNC members? He won’t say.

Here’s the video.

Daily COVID cases in New York City are now back to roughly what they were prior to the emergence of Omicron in early December 2021. This chart (from The New York Times) captures the sheer scale of the surge in terms of spread and infection if not severity of disease or mortality. Nationwide, cases are on a similar trajectory but perhaps a week or two behind.

It is still breathtaking to see in the context of the previous two years.

What started as a messaging effort by activists and good government lobbyists pushing Congress to reform the Electoral Count Act has turned into a fairly common talking point for Republicans in a matter of months. It’s been a little surprising to witness.

I’m highly skeptical of the savior/voice of reason role carved out for Ivanka Trump in this report from the Associated Press. But it’s still a very illuminating account of the course of events at the White House on the afternoon of January 6th. In one noteworthy addition, the account notes that as news networks were reporting live video of violent assaults and chaos at the Capitol Trump was cheering them on and seemingly providing his own live color commentary, rewinding and replaying the best parts to watch again. He couldn’t figure out why everyone else didn’t think it was as cool as he did.