Rep. Tom Rice (R-SC) recalled House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) being caught off guard when the South Carolina Republican voted to impeach former President Trump for “incitement of insurrection” in a Washington Post report published Sunday. Continue reading “Scalise Thought GOP Rep Who Voted For Trump Impeachment ‘Hit Wrong Button’”
One Woman Dead, Others Injured After Driver Slams Into MN Protest: Here’s What We Know
One woman is dead and others are injured after a man drove into a Minneapolis protest Sunday night.
Here’s what we know:
A Driver Smashed Into A Protest Of A Police Killing
Demonstrators had gathered in Minneapolis’ Uptown area to protest the shooting death of Winston Smith by undercover sheriff’s deputies earlier this month.
The deputies killed Smith, a Black man and a father, during an arrest attempt by a U.S. Marshals Service task force on June 3. The Marshals say Smith “failed to comply with officers’ commands” and “produced a handgun resulting in task force members firing upon the subject.” A woman who was with Smith at the time of the shooting contradicted that, saying through an attorney that she never saw a gun on Smith nor in his vehicle.
Sunday’s protest was the latest in several days of demonstrations over the killing in Minneapolis.
Witness Says Driver Sped Up Toward Protest
One witness told Minneapolis Public Radio that the driver sped toward protesters.
“A car came at us going like 70 or 80 miles an hour,” said D.J. Hooker, an organizer with with Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar. “There was one line of barriers and then a second barrier, and he sped up. He sped up. He went even faster as he approached us. You could hear it … start going even faster as he got close to us.”
MPR reported that witnesses saw the car hit a stationary vehicle that had been positioned in the street, apparently in order to protect the crowd. That stationary vehicle in turn hit protesters after being struck, according to the report.
Photos of the scene from photojournalist Chad Davis show multiple damaged vehicles
One has been pronounced dead after a vehicle drove through protesters and their barricades sending 3 to the hospital. The protesters, who've been gathering in Uptown Minneapolis since the Winston Smith killing, apprehended the driver who was then arrested by police. pic.twitter.com/3bHDnKquGh
— daviss (@daviss) June 14, 2021
Victim Identified By Brother, Police Mum On Motives
Garrett Knajdek told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that his sister Deona M. Knajdek was the protester killed. She would have turned 32 on Wednesday, he said.
Knajdek, citing information from his mother and police, confirmed to the paper that his sister “was using her car as a street blockade, and another vehicle struck her vehicle and her vehicle struck her.”
Minneapolis police spokespeople didn’t immediately respond to TPM’s questions Monday morning, but John Elder, the department’s director of public information, told news outlets that “the use of drugs or alcohol … may be a contributing factor in this crash.”
The crash occurred a few minutes before midnight, and Minneapolis Police subsequently reported that a woman had died “as a result of the crash.” Videos from the ground showed a man, presumably the driver, being held in a headlock and then being handed over to law enforcement.
Your Must Read for Today
Michigan Republicans’ wild and probably successful plan to get around the governor’s veto of voter suppression laws by getting 340,000 signatures.
Morning Memo: Merrick Garland Has Some Explaining To Do
Here are the stories that caught our attention.
Time For The DOJ To Explain Itself
Attorney General Merrick Garland will be meeting with CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times today to discuss the Trump administration’s seizure of electronic data from their reporters.
- What the journalists want: Assurance that this won’t happen again. “What we’re asking the attorney general tomorrow is to try to bind future administrations,” CNN Washington Bureau Chief Sam Feist said.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) isn’t buying denials from former top officials in the Trump DOJ that they knew about the data seizures. “That’s not the way the department works. I know from my experience on the Intelligence Committee that for special matters — whether it involves the members of Congress or senior members, you know, in the press — this would go to the attorney general’s office,” Swalwell told CNN on Sunday.
Jan. 6 Lives On
Rep. Tom Rice (R-SC), a staunch conservative who was one of the handful of Republicans to vote to impeach Trump over Jan. 6, told the Washington Post that House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) thought he’d pressed the wrong button when he cast his vote.
- Rice’s story: “I didn’t get to the bottom of the steps before Scalise called me and he said, ‘Tom, you hit the wrong button’ and I said, ‘No, it was the right vote.’ Then he said, ‘You sure?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.”
- Still, don’t forget that the South Carolina Republican voted against certifying the 2020 election results and he backed Texas’ absurd lawsuit attempting to throw out swing states’ votes for Biden.
Sen. Ron Johnson still wants you to think that the insurrection wasn’t a big deal. “It doesn’t look like an armed insurrection when you have people that breach the Capitol – and I don’t condone it – but they’re staying within the rope lines in the Rotunda,” he told Fox News.
- Apparently those rope lines extend to the inside of the entire Senate chamber:
The Right-Wing Culture War: ‘Critical Race Theory’ Edition
“Far-Right Snitch Network Targets Schools That Talk Race” – The Daily Beast
The mask in Louisiana is slipping right off. Harvard’s Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton shows how kids are about to “learn” the history of slavery:
There are two approved Louisiana history textbooks for the state's 8th graders.
This is how one of them introduces the Civil War: as tough times for a poor young white woman whose family owned 120 slaves. pic.twitter.com/oR617iSkFO
— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) June 14, 2021
The Fight For LGBTQ+ Liberation
“Deadly attacks on Black trans women are going up. This grieving mom is fighting back.” – CNN
This Is Still Happening
A woman at the site of a protest over a police killing of a Black man in Minneapolis was killed on Sunday night after a car drove into a crowd of demonstrators.
A Grim Pandemic Milestone
The U.S. is on the cusp of reaching 600,000 COVID-19 deaths, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.
Setting Fire To The Rain
Acosta: I don’t remember Dr. Fauci telling people to inject themselves with disinfectants. This sounds like Fauci derangement syndrome and they want to blame everybody but Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/u3bzXOuODu
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 13, 2021
A Buried Lead
Some salaries at the New Yorker stay under $60,000 even after 20 years on the job, according to this New York Times article on New Yorker writers who didn’t want to join their colleagues’ union efforts.
What Biden’s Up To Across The Pond
The President will be meeting with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and take part in the NATO summit in Brussels today. Then he’ll meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
China warns G-7 leaders: Don’t get cocky. “The days when global decisions were dictated by a small group of countries are long gone,” a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in London said in a statement on Sunday. “We always believe that countries, big or small, strong or weak, poor or rich, are equals, and that world affairs should be handled through consultation by all countries.”
4+4=5
Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who lied a lot, insisted on Sunday that she “never” lied because Jesus or something.
- No really, that’s what she’s trying to feed you: “As a woman of faith, as a mother of baby Blake, as a person who meticulously prepared at some of the world’s hardest institutions, I never lied,” she said during a Turning Point USA event.
What did you think of Morning Memo? Let us know.
Republicans Have A Bold Scheme To Hijack MI’s Elections Rules. Will They Pull It Off?
Nearly three months after the head of Michigan’s Republican Party unveiled an audacious plan that would allow GOP legislators to circumvent the state’s Democratic governor’s veto to pass restrictive voting laws, the contours of the scheme remain murky.
Readers Respond to Lab Leak #8
I don’t know who’s right or wrong. But I am as sure as I ever have been that this site’s greatest resource is its rich store of incredibly knowledgable readers. From TPM Reader PL …
Now that the lab leak theory has been back in the news, the fact that one of the first identified clusters was at a Wuhan wholesale food market is being discussed again. This happens to be an area where I have some understanding, and I’ve been frustrated with the degree to which everyone is reading things into it without context. Lab leak enthusiasts suggest that because it popped up in the same city as a virus lab it is evidence for the leak, whereas other people just used it to focus on racist “Chinese people eating weird things” stories. But the more likely explanation strikes me as a lot less interesting.
When I was in grad school I spent two years doing field research on design and business strategy in Chinese businesses. As part of this I researched China’s wholesale market system, and, as fate would have it, did ethnographic research on consumer electronics wholesale markets in and around Wuhan as well as other sites across China.
Susan Collins Backs ‘In-Depth’ Investigation Into Trump DOJ Leak Hunt
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) on Sunday threw her support behind an “in-depth” investigation into the Trump administration’s secret seizing of Apple data records of House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA). Continue reading “Susan Collins Backs ‘In-Depth’ Investigation Into Trump DOJ Leak Hunt”
AOC Rips Manchin’s ‘Older School Way’ Of Banking On Bipartisan Fantasies
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Sunday doubled down on her criticism of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who opposes the sweeping voting rights reform legislation known as the For the People Act that his Democratic colleagues have been trying to push through Congress. Continue reading “AOC Rips Manchin’s ‘Older School Way’ Of Banking On Bipartisan Fantasies”
DOJ Targeted McGahn’s Records While He Was Serving As Trump’s WH Counsel
Apple notified former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn and his wife last month that the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed information about their accounts in February 2018, while McGahn served as White House counsel under the Trump administration, according to the New York Times on Sunday. Continue reading “DOJ Targeted McGahn’s Records While He Was Serving As Trump’s WH Counsel”
‘Even Beyond Nixon’: Pelosi Swipes At Trump-Era Leak Probe Into Lawmakers
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Sunday decried the Trump administration’s secret seizing of Apple data records of House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) as going “even beyond Richard Nixon.” Continue reading “‘Even Beyond Nixon’: Pelosi Swipes At Trump-Era Leak Probe Into Lawmakers”