We can all rest easy knowing accountability is in the unassailable hands of the newly minted Republican House leadership.
Scalise’s remarks come the same day that Democratic lawmakers actually did something tangible about the fact that there’s a freshman member of Congress who was just sworn in after admitting he lied about basically everything he’s ever said and done.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Scalise Assures Us Santos Will Get A Stern Talking To, Thank God”The mystery of that three-page document continues and even seems to be picking up steam. I mentioned the gist in this earlier post here. The question is just what concessions Kevin McCarthy made to the Freedom Caucus to become speaker? It came up at a GOP conference meeting today. And apparently some details were revealed but not others. Indeed, there seemed to be some disagreement about whether it’s actually written down at all. Or, rather, there was disagreement about whether there is a mystery three-page document and then yet other commitments that weren’t even included in the three-page document. These latest details come from Axios’s afternoon email.
Continue reading “More on the Mystery Three Pager”The Republican Party filed a record number of lawsuits aimed at curtailing voting in 2022, with many aimed at restricting voting ahead of the midterms, according to a new report.
Continue reading “Republicans Filed A Record Number Of Anti-Voting Lawsuits In 2022”Brazil’s Supreme Court has ordered the arrest of Anderson Torres, who until Sunday served as chief of security in the country’s capital Brasilia, according to the English-language Brazilian Report. Torres is a former justice minister under ex-President Bolsonaro. At the moment he is on “vacation” in the United States. Torres is at the center of suspicions that pro-Bolsonaro authorities were negligent or worse in security preparations for Sunday’s demonstrations.
The House GOP has passed its rules package and now the 118th Congress in the House is off to the races. But the rules package was never where McCarthy’s real concessions resided. The rules package wasn’t what signed control of the House over to the Freedom Caucus. That was contained in informal promises where McCarthy agreed to cede control over the committee that schedules votes, where he committed to backing the Freedom Caucus’s debt default plans and more.
I had assumed these were verbal agreements over hand shakes. But apparently not. According to the insider sheet Punchbowl News, in addition to the 55-page rules package hashed out between McCarthy’s supporters and the Freedom Caucus, there was an additional, secret three-page document spelling out the real agreement.
From Punchbowl …
Continue reading “Where’s the Secret Three Pages?”The Post’s Ishaan Tharoor has an interesting rundown of differences and similarities between the events of Jan. 8 in Brazil and Jan. 6 two years ago. The fundamental difference, which any expert would have told you in advance, is the role of the Brazilian military and security services. Less than 40 years ago, Brazil was under military rule. Military rule is not some fantastical dystopia there. It’s the reality that most of the country’s political class grew up in.
Brazil’s insurrectionists had studied Jan. 6 closely. You can see that in so many of the visuals. But there was a key difference. The focus of the insurrectionists’ plan, in advance and on the day of, was to build support within the military. They camped out around military bases. They tried to build links to military factions. Nor was this some vain hope. It’s generally agreed that the military and security services were and are sympathetic to Bolsonaro. But political sympathy is not the same as a willingness to intervene to overthrow the political order. Tom Shannon, a former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, told Tharoor: “The Bolsonaro people had really studied January 6 and the conclusion that they came to was that Trump failed because he relied on a mob and that he had no institutional support.” Institutional support, in this case, being the army and the police.
Continue reading “More Thoughts About Jan. 8”Thanks to the 2022 midterms and Kansas’ primary election a few months earlier, there is now a very recent set of data points enforcing the reality that even in some deeply red states, majorities of voters support abortion access (or, at least, reject abortion restrictions).
Continue reading “Even After Midterm Losses, House Republicans Show No Inclination To Moderate On Abortion”Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) launched a Senate campaign on Tuesday.
While Porter didn’t call out Democrat Dianne Feinstein by name, her seat is up in 2024.
Continue reading “Porter Announces 2024 Senate Bid, Raising Questions About Feinstein’s Future”A cringe video Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) posted on Twitter was removed and Greene was temporarily locked out of her account after rapper Dr. Dre, also known as Andre Young, took legal action against the Republican for using one of his biggest hits without his permission.
Continue reading “Anyone Have Dr. Dre Temporarily Shutting Down MTG’s Twitter On Their 2023 Bingo Card?”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe has subpoenaed Rudy Giuliani as part of its investigation into Trump’s fundraising after the 2020 election, according to CNN.
The exact timing of the subpoena is a bit unclear. CNN reports that it was more than a month ago, and suggests similar subpoenas to other witnesses were issued in December, but its language is a bit unclear on the exact timing of Giuliani’s subpoena:
The subpoenas to other witnesses in addition to Giuliani were sent in late December, according to the other sources. …
The Giuliani subpoena and other December subpoenas represent a new round of inquiry, now from Smith’s office, which took shape over the holidays.
Bloomberg, also reporting on a subpoena to Giuliani but without tying it specifically to the fundraising investigation, says it was issued in early November, before Smith was appointed special counsel.
The NYT likewise dates the subpoena issuance to November, but it offers an additional caveat: “It remained unclear, however, if Mr. Smith and his team have assumed control of the part of the inquiry related to Mr. Giuliani.”
So some conflicting reporting that we’ll be trying to clear up in the coming days.
CNN provides new details on the emerging contours of the fundraising aspect of the investigation:
Prosecutors have also subpoenaed other witnesses who are close to Trump, asking specifically for documents related to disbursements from the Save America PAC, Trump’s primary fundraising operation set up shortly after the 2020 election, according to other sources with insight into the probe.
The subpoena for documents and testimony from Giuliani came from a Washington DC grand jury, Bloomberg reports. CNN says the prosecutor on Smith’s team associated with the subpoena is David Rody:
The inquiry to Giuliani came from David Rody, a former top prosecutor in New York who specializes in gang and conspiracy cases and is assisting Smith with examining a broader criminal conspiracy after the election, according to some of the sources.
The upshot of all this, as CNN puts it:
Taken together, the subpoenas demonstrate prosecutors’ growing interest in following the money after the 2020 election as part of their sweeping criminal probe around Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss of the presidency.
The special purpose grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, that had been investigating Trumpworld interference in the 2020 election has filed a final report and been disbanded, but things only start to get interesting now:
Keep an eye on whether Willis decides to go public with indictments before the special grand jury report is released. But some caution is warranted. The NYT suggests a different timeline (that speaks to why a special grand jury was empaneled in the first place):
Regular grand jury terms last two months. Defendants who are indicted can request speedy trials that begin by the close of the term that follows the two-month period in which they are indicted. Because of those protocols, most charges would most likely be brought at the beginning of the next grand jury term in early March, or further down the road.
Stay tuned.
For a time Monday it looked like the full unredacted deposition of Donald Trump in the defamation case against him by Jean Carroll would be released publicly. But Trump’s lawyers objected, saying the judge had mis-entered an earlier order in the matter that mislead them. They asked to delay the unsealing of the deposition transcript and be given three additional days to object. Later in the day, the judge reversed course and granted the delay.
Norm Pattis, suspended from practicing law by a state judge in Connecticut for allegedly unethical conduct while defending Alex Jones, spent Monday trying to convince a federal judge in DC to allow him to continue to represent a Proud Boys defendant.
I’m going to put this here right now and probably return to it in a future Morning Memo.
As you probably saw, CBS News first reported Monday that back in November private lawyers for President Biden found classified documents from his vice presidency at the think tank he previously set up in DC. CBS’s report was quickly confirmed and reproduced by other major new outlets.
The specific facts matter a great deal, so here’s what’s reported so far:
You might not know it from the initial round of punditry, but it is not a sophisticated political analysis to anticipate the myriad ways in which Republicans and Trumpworld will use this news in bad faith ways to defend the Mar-a-Lago case.
Of course that’s exactly what Republicans did. Here’s Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, eager to be interviewed:
How ironic. Now we learn that Joe Biden had documents that are considered classified. I wonder, is the National Archives going to trigger a raid of the White House tonight? Or of the Biden Center? …
So now we’re going to take that information that we requested on the Mar-a-Lago raid, and we’re going to expand it to include the documents that Joe Biden has.
For now, let me kick it over to EmptyWheel.
A campaign finance watchdog has filed a complaint with the (mostly toothless) FEC alleging that Rep. George Santos (R-NY) hid the source of donations to his campaign and violated other provisions of campaign finance law.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center zeroed in on the $700,000 loan Santos claimed to have made to his own campaign, alleging that he relied on unknown individuals or corporations to donate those funds.
Jonathan Chait: “Ron DeSantis Is Imposing Political Control on Schools”
After trying to beg off and facing an even bleaker cycle in 2024 than in 2022, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) has succumbed to pressure from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and agreed to run the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for a second consecutive cycle.
Greenhouse gas emissions in the United States rose by 1.3 percent in 2022: “The new estimate puts nationwide emissions back in line with their long-term trajectory after nearly two years of Covid-related disruptions.”
Anne Applebaum: “What the Rioters in Brazil Learned From Americans”
The State Department has weighed in generally on former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s visa status. Without mentioning Bolsonaro by name, State Department spokesperson Nick Price told reporters Monday:
If an A visa holder is no longer engaged in official business on behalf of that government, it is incumbent on that visa holder to depart the U.S., or to request a change to another immigration status within 30 days. If an individual has no basis on which to be in the United States, an individual is subject to removal by the Department of Homeland Security.”
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro is saying he plans to return to Brazil sooner than expected:
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