The threat that Republicans have been teasing since before the 2022 midterms looms all the larger on this side of the debt ceiling, as the Treasury Department shuffles money around to keep paying our bills.
Continue reading “What Defaulting On Our Debt Would Actually Look Like”Dem Guvs Jump At Chance To Counter DeSantis’ Ban On African American Studies
Two Democratic governors jumped at the chance to go after Republican Governor Ron DeSantis (FL) for his recent ban on an Advanced Placement African American Studies course, with one vowing to enforce teaching the course in full in his state.
Continue reading “Dem Guvs Jump At Chance To Counter DeSantis’ Ban On African American Studies”Albanian Firm Ties Indicted Former FBI Official To Yet Another Disgraced Former Agent
Indicted former top FBI official Charles McGonigal is a partner in an Albanian firm along with another disgraced former FBI agent, records obtained by TPM show.
Continue reading “Albanian Firm Ties Indicted Former FBI Official To Yet Another Disgraced Former Agent”House Republicans: Please Get Us Out of This
According to a report in Bloomberg News, there’s an increasing push among House Republicans to pass some kind of short-term “clean” debt ceiling bill. It would likely be a “suspension” of the debt ceiling rather than raising it. For these purposes, however, same difference. As we noted yesterday, the governing idea seems to be to time a debt-ceiling crisis to Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. This would combine both a debt default cliff and a government shut down cliff on one big fiscal Armageddon day.
There are two goals to this. One is to add pressure by bundling all the bad, scary things into a single day (though I’m not sure that actually places more pressure on the White House) and also to make it a date certain. Currently, the Treasury is doing all these accounting tricks, juggling things in the air, also dealing with the uncertainty of just when tax revenues come in. It’s very hard to know just when the big moment comes and the Treasury doesn’t necessarily have a strong interest in telling the House just when that happens. If you’re planning a showdown you want to know exactly when showdown day is. This would provide that certainty for House Republicans. It would definitely come exactly on Sept. 30.
Continue reading “House Republicans: Please Get Us Out of This”Paul Pelosi Video Released
Under court order, San Francisco police have just released video of the assault on Paul Pelosi and the arrest of his attacker David DePape. I’d suggest a soft content warning. It’s not gory but you do see DePape in one quick moment slam the hammer down on to Pelosi’s head, though Pelosi is slightly out of the picture at that point. Video under the fold.
Continue reading “Paul Pelosi Video Released”The Fight Over Abortion Pills Is The Fight Over The Post-Dobbs World
Though the anti-abortion movement notched a historic victory in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it now faces a landscape where the medications collectively known as “the abortion pill” are increasingly accessible.
Continue reading “The Fight Over Abortion Pills Is The Fight Over The Post-Dobbs World”The ‘Weaponization’ Committee is Just a Reboot of the ‘Durham Probe’ from Capitol Hill
Thursday The New York Times published a retrospective and analysis of the “Durham investigation,” the probe Bill Barr stood up to discredit the earlier Trump/Russia probes and which long served as the shining hope of Trump partisans, the vehicle of a promised vengeance that never arrived. Indeed, Durham’s investigation has lasted almost four years, far longer than any of the various probes it purported to scrutinize. The picture the Times story paints is stark if unsurprising: a politicized, instinctively unethical and deeply corrupt effort which managed to embody in almost cartoonish fashion the story it sought to tell about the original Russia investigation. The one thing a criminal investigation is never supposed to be is one that starts knowing the conclusion it wants to arrive at, brings a heavy dose of political motivation and bends rules and cuts corner to get where it wants to go. That caricature describes the Durham probe to a T. The two cases Durham managed to bring to trial were mainly vehicles for airing tendentious conspiracy theories he couldn’t prove and had no real evidence for. The actual cases were laughed out of court with speedy acquittals.
Continue reading “The ‘Weaponization’ Committee is Just a Reboot of the ‘Durham Probe’ from Capitol Hill”Loneliness And Cupcakes: How Santos Is Spending His First Few Weeks In Congress
Wondering what the Anna Delvey of Capitol Hill Rep. George Santos (R-NY) has been up to the last few weeks — besides dodging reporters and claiming he knows nothing about those FEC filings? It seems he is trying to make the best out of the time he has in Congress.
Continue reading “Loneliness And Cupcakes: How Santos Is Spending His First Few Weeks In Congress”The Worst Attorney General In 50 Years Was Even More Corrupt Than We Thought
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:
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Where Things Stand: One Attention Seeker Meets With Another Attention Seeker
Would love to be a fly on the wall for this bro-fest.
The one attention-seeker who debased himself on the House floor for an entire week in order to get his new job wanted to show the other attention-seeker, who pretended to want to buy Twitter to own the libs and then actually had to buy it, his new office.
According to several reports from the Hill it seems that Elon Musk met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) today. McCarthy claims that the meeting was just a couple of old pals broing out on his birthday.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: One Attention Seeker Meets With Another Attention Seeker”