A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Don’t Stop Reading Yet!

I know it’s hard to start your Monday reading about the federal budget, but I’ll keep this one pretty simple even though it’s an important point.

I’ve been getting questions from non-experts in recent days about the difference between the debt ceiling hostage-taking and a government shutdown, about why the House GOP might relent on the debt ceiling until later this year, and about the interplay between the debt ceiling and a government shutdown.

The key point that the casual observers I run into don’t have firmly in their minds is that the federal budget for fiscal year 2023 was just passed last month in the lame duck session of Congress. The $1.7 trillion omnibus bill that President Biden signed on Dec. 29? That funds the federal government through the fiscal year that ends in September.

So to put it succinctly, House Republicans have virtually no say, no control, no forcing mechanism to redo the 2023 federal budget. That ship has sailed. They’re trying to use the debt ceiling to force the Democratic Senate and White House to re-open the books on 2023, even though that was all wrapped up a month ago.

I won’t get into all the reasons now that this is political terrorism, taking the world economy hostage under threat of a default by the federal government. Kate Riga covers that here. But you can see why – given that 2023 is already funded and House Republicans don’t have any other leverage – Democrats are content to tell them to pound sand on the debt ceiling.

How does this all square with a government shutdown?

A government shutdown wouldn’t happen at earliest until October, when the new fiscal year begins. House Republicans do have leverage there. To fund the government in the new fiscal years requires a new budget to be passed, and that means the House has to play ball. They will of course demand budget cuts and priorities consistent with their preferences, and the Democratic Senate and White House will have to negotiate with McCarthy et al. That’s normal and to be expected. A government shutdown is an extreme threat at the negotiating table, but it’s not as extreme as a debt-ceiling default.

The reporting in recent days that Republicans may kick the can on the debt limit down the road to October and fold it in with the annual budget negotiations reflects the limited leverage they have now and the greater leverage they’ll have then.

I hope this helps clear up any confusion, without offending budget experts by oversimplifying things.

The Week Ahead

President Biden and Speaker McCarthy are scheduled to meet Wednesday to discuss the House GOP’s debt limit hostage-taking.

What The Tyre Nichols Video Shows

The NYT has the most comprehensive analysis of the video released by Memphis police that even Donald Trump couldn’t defend.

Matt Gaetz Gets The NYT Treatment

Confess I started reading this article with a sense of dread, but the NYT showed unusual flourish in profiling Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL):

• “political arsonist”
• “chief tormentor”
• “insatiable limelight seeker”
• “prankish and abundantly coifed”
• “chubby and bombastic adolescent”
• “boorish”

The Curious Case Of Charles McGonigal

TPM: Albanian Firm Ties Indicted Former FBI Official To Yet Another Disgraced Former Agent

NYT: How an Oligarch May Have Recruited the F.B.I. Agent Who Investigated Him

DOJ Will Try To Accommodate Intel Committees On Classified Docs Probes

In a letter Saturday to the Senate intel committee, the Justice Department said it was working to provide the committee information on the classified documents found in the possession of Presidents Trump and Biden without compromising the two active special counsel probes.

SCOTUS Has Financial Ties With Chertoff

The Supreme Court’s investigation of the leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs has been a fiasco from the start. Now CNN reports that the firm of former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who gave the internal probe his seal of approval, had contracted with the court in recent years for security assessments.

The Right-Wing Attack On ESG

WaPo: Meet the dark-money group sharpening the GOP attack on ‘woke’ climate policies

Book Banning Is Getting Worse

Anne Lutz Fernandez with a rundown of the current state of play in schools and libraries across the country.

Molotov Cocktail Thrown At New Jersey Synagogue

The attack early Sunday morning was captured on surveillance video but did little damage to the synagogue.

Dozen Killed In Explosion At Pakistani Mosque

The blast in Peshawar killed more than 30 people and injured more than 100 others. Many of the dead were policemen. The mosque was inside a police compound, the WaPo reports.

Israel Strikes Inside Iran

Israel launched a drone strike against a weapons facility in Iran.

Cool Reporting

WSJ: The Covert Polish Repair Shop Patching Up Ukrainian Arms

More Campaign Finance Troubles For George Santos

Mother Jones: We Tried to Call the Top Donors to George Santos’ 2020 Campaign. Many Don’t Seem to Exist.

McCarthy Not So Deftly Dodges The George Santos Question

The speaker of the House talks in circles rather than answering the question about George Santos:

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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Single Malt Justice

It turns out Bill Barr and John Durham were sipping scotch as they burned down Main Justice.

Extraordinary new reporting from the New York Times peels back more layers of corruption, malfeasance, and politicization within the Barr Justice Department. In a groundbreaking story that is focused on Special Counsel John Durham but is really an indictment of Barr, the NYT unveils several previously unreported episodes:

• Durham Investigated Trump?!? The most explosive revelation in the NYT piece is that Barr allegedly directed Durham to dramatically expand his brief beyond “investigating the investigators” by opening a financial crimes investigation in the fall of 2019 of President Donald Trump based on a tantalizing tip from Italian authorities. It’s unclear how and to what extent Durham investigated the tip. No charges ever resulted. While it’s unclear what exactly Durham did with the tip, the strong impression left by the story is that the Trump investigation was buried.
• Oopsies! The New York Times and other news outlets later misleadingly reported that Durham’s review of the origins of the Trump-Russia probe had turned into a criminal investigation, suggesting that the Durham was zeroing in on the investigators of Trump. In fact, Durham’s criminal probe involved Trump himself. Barr never sought to correct the widespread public misperception:

The news reports, however, were all framed around the erroneous assumption that the criminal investigation must mean Mr. Durham had found evidence of potential crimes by officials involved in the Russia inquiry. Mr. Barr, who weighed in publicly about the Durham inquiry at regular intervals in ways that advanced a pro-Trump narrative, chose in this instance not to clarify what was really happening.

• Resignations … Lots Of Them. Multiple members of Durham’s team allegedly resigned in disputes over prosecutorial ethics and the charging decisions he was making.
• Bogus Intel. In an unbelievably ironic twist, Durham allegedly used dubious intel from the Dutch and sidestepped a federal judge’s objections to obtain emails from a U.S. citizen who worked at a pro-democracy organization founded by George Soros. Later the Trump administration would infuriate the Dutch by publicly revealing the intel.
• Election Interference. The bad-faith machinations of Barr and Durham reached their zenith in the summer of 2020, when Barr allegedly pressed Durham to draft an interim report before Election Day. The draft interim report was never released but it prompted the resignation of a longtime Durham protege. Then there’s this nugget about how Durham’s original investigation had never panned out:

By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Mr. Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane” after all.

There’s a lot more. Definitely worth a read.

John Eastman Faces Disbarment In California

In a scathing 11-count complaint, the California state bar has moved to disbar former Trump lawyer John Eastman, the architect of the Jan. 6 coup plot. Here’s the meat of the complaint:

What’s Jack Smith Up To?

Ken Cuccinelli was spotted at the federal courthouse in DC and confirmed to CNN that he was there to testify to a grand jury but he didn’t know about what:

Cuccinelli headed into the grand jury area just before 10 a.m. ET at the federal courthouse, where prosecutors looking at efforts to undermine the 2020 election as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation are also gathered.

Cuccinelli, a top official in the Trump DHS, intersected with the 2020 election subversion scheme, at various points. He cited privilege in refusing to answer some of the Jan. 6 committee’s questions, privilege claims Special Counsel Jack Smith may be able to sidestep with the grand jury:

Worth reviewing the Jan. 6 committee transcript for clues as to what DOJ might want from CUCCINELLI. He declined to answer some of the committee’s quesitons, citing privilege. Here’s an example: https://t.co/2IpOKul9gh pic.twitter.com/4LBoszkyJV

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) January 26, 2023

Trump Dealt Setback In Jan. 6 Lawsuit

A federal judge in DC declined to dismiss a civil lawsuit by Capitol Police officers against Donald Trump and others for injuries they sustained on Jan. 6.

Bouquets And Brickbats

Bouquet: “Gay and bisexual men in monogamous relationships will no longer be forced to abstain from sex to donate blood under federal guidelines to be proposed in coming days, ending a vestige of the earliest days of the AIDS crisis.”

Brickbat: “Tennessee has rejected millions of dollars from the federal government for HIV/AIDS prevention — a move that public health experts worry will politicize the response to the disease and has the potential to destabilize decades of progress in getting the epidemic under control.”

Memphis On Edge Ahead Of Release Of Police Beating Video

Memphis is expected to release Friday evening the “absolutely appalling” video of police officers beating a 29-year-old Black man to death after a traffic stop. Five police officers, all Black, have been arrested and charged in the case.

The Misinformation Is Never-Ending

Just another normal Thursday night on Fox News:

As Tucker nods along, Rep. Ken Buck makes up a claim about Google changing its algorithm during the 2020 election to help Biden and hurt Trump pic.twitter.com/82zWynlhRp

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 27, 2023

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