Editors’ Blog

A federal judge is placing the burden on John Eastman to demonstrate that he had an attorney-client relationship and thus privilege in his efforts to help ex-President Trump launch a coup to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The current argument turns on more than 500 pages of emails from just the days between January 4th and January 7th, 2021.

What jumps out at me is the fact that in his responses Eastman quite openly plays to the fact that his strategy is to delay until the committee is disbanded by a new Republican majority in early 2023. “To the extent the congressional defendants’ claimed ‘urgent need for resolution of the privilege issues’ is motivated by the looming 2022 midterm election, this is not a valid reason to alter this Court’s January 26 order,” Eastman’s attorney wrote in reply to the arguments put forward by House lawyers.

A headline last night from the Times: “Tone of Ukraine Crisis Shifts as Russia Signals Openness to Talk More.”

There are also some limited signs that Russia is redeploying some number of military personnel from their forward positions up against the Ukraine border back to their regular bases.

TIL what a “hoser” is.

In Canadian pop-culture, it’s a term used to describe the type of personality that former president Trump tends to embody — the brand of bombastic extremism that makes up the personality of people who currently occupy the center of the Canadian populism movement: think loud, uncouth and skeptical of facts, precedent and the government in general.

This (below) is a tweet from over the weekend from the Russian Embassy in South Africa. It’s an example of the dynamic I was talking about yesterday. U.S. diplomats have apparently told NATO allies, based on U.S. intelligence, that Russia had set February 16th, Wednesday, as a possible or probable invasion date. This is at least consistent with various moves by the U.S. and NATO allies over recent days — pulling out dependents, canceling civilian flights and such. Here Russia is denying it has any plans to invade on Wednesday and claims that the warnings are part of a U.S. plot to create a provocation which justifies NATO military action inside Ukraine. This is the kind of wrong-footing I’m talking about.

There has been a growing chorus of articles arguing that the Biden administration is trying to confront Russia on its own ground of information warfare. The key example is moving rapidly to declassify military intelligence about Russian moves to eliminate their potential element of surprise. The administration is trying to upend Russian tactics by continually revealing what they’re about to do or what they are preparing to do in advance. But there is something else they are doing that is getting less direct attention, something I mentioned earlier this month.

I wanted to share with you this post about the situation in Ottawa, sent along TPM Reader JK. I recommend reading the whole thing. But this is the gist:

What’s happening in Ottawa, they were clear, is two separate events happening in tandem: there is a broadly non-violent (to date) group of Canadians with assorted COVID-related gripes, ranging from the somewhat justified to totally frickin’ insane. But that larger group, which has knocked Ottawa and too many of our leaders into what my colleague Jen Gerson so perfectly described as “stun-fucked stasis,” is now providing a kind of (mostly) unwitting cover to a cadre of seasoned street brawlers whose primary goal is to further erode the legitimacy of the state — not just the city of Ottawa, or Ontario or Canada, but of democracies generally.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the RNC’s latest missive and some glimmers of hope for the Biden administration in the economy and pandemic.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

There’s a comprehensive new report out from religious scholars and prominent Christian faith groups in the U.S. that dissects the role Christian nationalism played in inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and also previews ways in which Christian nationalism could be harnessed to embolden future acts of political violence.

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.