A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
MAGA Revenge Mission Completed
As expected, House Jan. 6 Committee vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) was defeated in her primary by Trump-backed Harriet Hageman last night. Cheney’s was the last primary of all the House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection.
- The vote tallies in Cheney’s race, with approximately 99 percent of the ballots counted as of this morning, show it was a bloodbath: Hageman got 66.3 percent of the vote, while Cheney reached only 28.9, per the Washington Post.
- Cheney’s defeat means only two of the 10 pro-impeachment House Republicans will still be in Congress come next year:
- Dan Newhouse (R-WA)
- David Valadao (R-CA)
- In addition to Cheney, three other pro-impeachment GOP lawmakers who dared to run again ended up losing their jobs:
- Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA)
- Peter Meijer (R-MI)
- Tom Rice (R-SC)
- The remaining four just straight-up resigned:
- Fred Upton (R-MI)
- John Katko (R-NY)
- Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH)
- Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), the one other Republican besides Cheney on the House Jan. 6 Committee.
- In contrast, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), the only Republican senator who convicted Trump in the impeachment trial to face a primary this year, survived her primary against Trump endorsee Kelly Tshibaka. However, they’ll both be facing off against each other again in the general election due to Alaska’s “top four” voting system.
Election Truther Now Set To Be Wyoming’s Next Secretary Of State
Chuck Gray, a Trump endorsee and 2020 election fraud conspiracist, won the Republican primary for Wyoming secretary of state last night. And since no Democrats ran for the position, Gray’s victory means he’ll be overseeing the elections in 2024.
Biden Signs Historic Climate Bill
The President signed the Inflation Reduction Act on Tuesday, scoring a major victory for his seemingly imperiled agenda on addressing climate change and health care costs.
FBI Interviewed Top Trump WH Lawyers About Trump’s Pilfered Docs
The FBI interviewed Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy, Patrick Philbin, earlier this year about the boxes of records Trump took with him to his Mar-a-Lago resort at the end of his presidency, according to the New York Times.
- Cipollone and Philbin were reportedly two of Trump’s representatives to the National Archives.
- “It’s not theirs, it’s mine,” Trump the septuagenarian toddler reportedly said when his advisers tried to return the presidential documents to the National Archives, which is required by law under the Presidential Records Act.
DHS Inspector General Won’t Recuse Himself From Secret Service Text Probe
Joseph Cuffari, the Department of Homeland Security’s Trump-appointed inspector general, is refusing to step down from the investigation into the Secret Service’s deleted Jan. 6 texts, despite House Oversight chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Homeland Security chair Bennie Thompson’s (D-MS) demands that he do so.
- Cuffari told the lawmakers last week in a letter released yesterday that not only would he not recuse himself from the probe, but he also wouldn’t allow his staffers to sit for interviews with the House committees.
- The infuriated committee chairs on Tuesday accused Cuffari of trying to “obstruct” their investigation and threatened to “consider alternate means to ensure compliance” if the inspector general didn’t get out of the way.
NC GOP Nominee Decries MAL Raid As Dangerous As Overpriced Clothing
Bo Hines, a Trump-backed nominee running in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District, tried to jump in on his fellow Republicans’ howls that the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago portended the U.S. becoming a “banana republic,” and this is how it went:
FLOTUS Tests Positive For COVID
First Lady Jill Biden tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday after she started to develop “cold-like symptoms,” her office announced on Tuesday. She’s now being treated with Paxlovid and is dealing with only mild symptoms, per the announcement.
Ex-Australian PM Secretly Appointed Himself As Five Different Ministers
Then-Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison secretly swore himself in as health minister, finance minister, home affairs minister, treasury minister and industry minister between March 2020 and May 2021, current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed yesterday. And that came as news to some of the actual ministers, who were unaware that they had been sharing their jobs with Morrison.
Morrison, who’s still a member of Parliament, went with the classic “whoops-I-forgot-to-tell-the-country-I-illegitimately-granted-myself-extra-power-my-bad” defense during a local radio interview on Tuesday:
“Sometimes we forget what was happening two years ago and the situation we were dealing with. It was an unconventional time and an unprecedented time.”
– a guy invoking that defense very convincingly
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
I don’t know what the big deal is about all those “top secret” documents.
ETA that i’m firsty. Need covfefe! Stat!
Good Morning Folks!
Biden can give Congress a written explanation and 30 days notice he’s terminating Cuffari. Seemingly refusal to cooperate with a Congressional investigation of communications gone missing during the transition to his administration would suffice.
Step up, Prez.
So with the losses reported of sane GOP’ers, doesn’t this actually help the cause of the Democrats that are running against these nincompoops that insist the election was stolen? Don’t these seats now become more of a toss-up because voters don’t entirely buy this stolen election nonsense? Shouldn’t the Dems focus on these seats and make sure the voters identify those folks that want to take their votes away?
And in other news, it looks like the Wisconsin Democrats are taking a play from the campaign book being used in Pennsylvania, with this ad that showed up this morning:
FacT cheCK. BideN isn’t PResidEnt. TrUmp is.