It appears Senate Republicans don’t want to touch House Republicans’ plans to hold the debt ceiling hostage with a 10-foot pole.
As new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and the rest of his caucus threaten to breach the debt limit if they don’t get their way on spending cuts to vital programs like Medicare and Social Security, Senate Republicans are making it clear that this is a McCarthy problem.
Solomon Pena, the failed GOP House candidate who’s been arrested for allegedly orchestrating shootings at the homes of Democratic officials, was denied bail by a New Mexico judge on Monday.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Another One Bites The Dust
The Jan. 6 rioter who famously propped his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk – and left her a note saying “Nancy, Bigo was here bi-otch” – was convicted by a DC federal jury of obstructing Congress and of disorderly conduct in the Capitol while carrying a dangerous weapon.
Second Oath Keepers Seditious Conspiracy Trial Ends In Convictions
After 13 hours of deliberations, a federal jury in DC convicted four Oath Keepers of seditious conspiracy and related charges for their roles in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
This was the second successful prosecution of Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy, following last year’s conviction of group leader Stewart Rhodes and others.
‘No Wanks’
While the Oath Keepers and Richard Barnett were being convicted elsewhere in the same courthouse, the seditious conspiracy trial of the Proud Boys descended into weirdness:
Carmen Hernandez, attorney for Zach REHL, now asking the FBI case agent about this part of the Proud Boys initiation manual. pic.twitter.com/5M9mnOAafH
A Georgia judge will hear arguments on whether to release publicly the report of the special grand jury investigating Trump’s interference in the state’s 2020 election.
Even if the Trump and Biden investigations turn out to be factually and legally quite different, as it seems they might, the dual special counsel structure will make it hard for the department to portray its decisions as principled. Normally in such prominent side-by-side investigations, an official reporting to the attorney general would ensure that the same legal and discretionary judgments informed decision-making in the two cases. But these decisions are now delegated to the special counsels Jack Smith and Robert Hur, who do not have the incentives or even the mechanism to coordinate their decision making.
Worst Attorney General Since John Mitchell
Aaron Blake: William Barr is still being misleading about the Mueller report
This Case Is So Crazy, Y’all
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JANUARY 23: Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office, stands silently as his Attorney Seth Ducharme gives a statement to the media after leaving Manhattan Federal Court on January 23, 2023 in New York City. McGonigal is being charged with money laundering, and conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions against Russia while secretly working with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Sergey Shestakov, a former Soviet and Russian diplomat, has also been charged in the case. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
The counterintel and law enforcement worlds were rocked by the arrest of a former top FBI official on not one but two separate federal indictments, one in NYC, the other in Washington, DC.
Very roughly, the DC indictment covers the time that Charles McGonigal was still at the FBI, and the New York indictment covers the period since his retirement from the bureau.
Just one more data point in support of the debt ceiling hostage taking being done entirely in bad faith:
A glimpse into the House GOP debt limit dilemma: Rep. Nancy Mace calls for spending cuts to balance the budget, but here's what happened when @ChuckTodd asked her to identify one thing she'd cut 👇 pic.twitter.com/MvjSNPqhio
You remember the minor German nobleman with alleged fever dreams of restoring the Second Reich, circa 1871?
It turns out that investigation was merely a spinoff from another coup probe which was unveiled yesterday by German authorities.
The two alleged plots have similar underlying origins in the extremist Reichsbürger movement, but the latest revelations have their own eye-popping details. Among the alleged aims of the five people arrested:
blow up power supply facilities;
kidnap Health Minister Karl Lauterbach and subject him to a show trial;
put an actor on TV pretending to be the president or chancellor and announce that the government had been deposed and that the constitution of 1871 was in force again.
Reactionary revanchism is the emerging theme of the early 21st century.
Do you have news, tips, leads for Morning Memo? Let us know!
A Georgia state judge on Tuesday will hear arguments on whether to release a report drafted by a grand jury into President Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election result in that state.
Needless to say there’s quite a lot in these indictments of former FBI counterintelligence agent Charles McGonigal et al. There are a number of points I want to note. But let me start with this one.
A fair amount of this information has been public for a long time. I was surprised to see the September 2022 Insider article on the investigation that Josh Kovensky linked in his write up. But I also found this Twitter thread from independent journalist Wendy Siegelman from December 13, 2021. She flags and discusses a November 29th, 2021 FARA filing which actually details a number of the basic relationships if not the specific crimes set forth in today’s New York indictments. Indeed, if you read the FARA filing you can easily identify a number of people in the indictment. People like “Agent-1,” for instance, who appears to be Yevgeny Fokin. I was surprised to see so much of this revealed in a FARA filing more than a year ago.
A jury convicted four more members of the far-right Oath Keepers group of seditious conspiracy today, bringing to a close one the highest-profile prosecutions to be brought thus far in response to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. It also leaves us with the question: will that be it when it comes to accountability for the attack?
In closing arguments on Monday, some of the Oath Keepers’ lawyers were not subtle in outlining where they believe the real blame for the attack should lie.
“Responsibility really rests at our politicians’ feet,” Scott Weinberg, the attorney for Oath Keeper David Moerschel said on Monday, per the Washington Post. “The president and Stewart Rhodes were claiming that the world is coming to an end even before the election.”
Put this down as more irony than smoking gun. But for those of us who’ve had serious questions for a long time about the FBI’s New York field office, especially in the run up to the 2016 presidential campaign, here’s an interesting detail. Charles McGonigal was put in charge of counterintelligence at the New York field office some time in the second half of October 2016, just about exactly when the Clinton emails case was reopened in the final days of the campaign. An Oct. 4, 2016 press release announced his appointment and said he would “assume this new role at the end of October.”
I doubt he was there in time to have played a direct role in the highly questionable decision-making. But still … well, interesting.
The same FBI official accused of illegally working for a Russian oligarch also faces charges of concealing a $225,000 payment while he was working for the bureau, court papers say.
We’ll be bringing you more on this shortly. But the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI’s New York Field Office has been arrested and charged with money laundering and sanctions busting with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. That happened after he retired from the FBI in 2018. That was the first indictment released. But a short time later a second set of charges in Washington, D.C., were released. These are tied to the time he was still working for the FBI in 2017 and 2018. He allegedly received $225,000 in cash from an individual he knew to be an employee of a foreign intelligence service. The Deripaska related charges have gotten the most press so far, presumably because they came out first. But the second set of charges seems like a much graver matter.
I’m only getting my head around the details now. So I’m going to leave it to these outlines. But needless to say this is a very big deal. We’ll be bringing you more details shortly.
