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.

Mother Jones just reported that the new guy that the George Santos campaign listed as its new treasurer on FEC filings Wednesday is not actually his campaign’s new treasurer.

Their headline is 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 George Santos’ New Treasurer Wants You to Know He’s Not George Santos’ Treasurer.

Mother Jones called the attorney for Thomas Datwyler, a campaign finance consultant who was listed on a handful of FEC docs filed by campaign committees affiliated with George Santos as the Santos campaign’s new treasurer today, replacing Nancy Marks. Datwyler’s attorney told the publication that he never agreed to be treasurer and even told the campaign straight up that he wasn’t interested in the gig.

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.

Former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro’s contempt trial for defying the Jan. 6 committee’s subpoena is coming up in less than a week. And Trump’s lawyers are asserting once more, in a last-ditch effort at proving something, that Navarro was right to have blown off the congressional subpoena because he was protected by executive privilege.

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.

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