American Conservative Union chair and Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) organizer Matt Schlapp on Tuesday didn’t blink at a deranged rant from far-right Hungarian Prime Minister and CPAC speaker Viktor Orbán about different races mixing together.
Continue reading “CPAC Keeping Orbán As Keynote Speaker Even After Nazi-Esque Rant Against ‘Race Mixing’”Trump Never Ordered Troops To Be Ready On Jan. 6, His Defense Secretary Testifies
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
But But Trump Said He Did!
The House Jan. 6 Committee released more new footage of witness testimony on Tuesday, with this particular clip coming from testimony from former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller on whether Trump had ordered troops to be ready protect the Capitol on Jan. 6.
- Miller disputed Trump and ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ claims that the then-president had done so. “I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature,” the ex-Pentagon chief testified.
- Trump has claimed he ordered 20,000 troops, and Meadows claimed on Fox that it was 10,000 troops. It was, in fact, zero, per Miller.
- Miller said explicitly in his testimony that there was “no order from the President” on deploying troops, and that there was nothing “more than contingency planning.”
DOJ Scrutinizing Trump’s Actions In Jan. 6 Probe
The Washington Post and the New York Times report that the investigators in the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 probe have been asking witnesses about Trump’s role in the scheme to steal the 2020 election.
- Prosecutors also obtained phone records of top Trump White House officials and staffers in April, according to the Post and the Times.
- However, none of this necessarily means the DOJ has opened a criminal investigation into the ex-president.
Garland Leaves Door Open For Prosecuting Trump
Attorney General Merrick Garland told NBC News on Tuesday that Trump’s status as a former president won’t stop the DOJ from potentially prosecuting him in the Jan. 6 investigation. Same goes if Trump decides to run again, Garland said, because “we will hold accountable anyone who is criminally responsible for attempting to interfere with the transfer — legitimate, lawful transfer of power from one administration to the next.”
Dems Demand DHS IG Recuse Himself From Secret Service Probe
House Oversight Committee chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and House Homeland Security Committee/Jan. 6 Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) on Tuesday wrote a letter calling on Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari to recuse himself from the investigation into the Secret Service’s deleted texts.
- Maloney and Thompson pointed to how Cuffari, a Trump appointee, didn’t alert Congress when he first found out in December that the texts sent and received by the Secret Service on Jan. 5 and 6 last year had been erased. The inspector general didn’t inform Congress of the deleted texts until July.
- Cuffari’s lack of disclosure “cast serious doubt on his independence and his ability to effectively conduct such an important investigation,” Maloney and Thompson wrote.
Jan. 6 Panel In Talks With Pompeo For Potential Interview
The House Jan. 6 Committee has tentative plans to hold a private interview with Mike Pompeo, Trump’s former Secretary of State, in the coming days, according to ABC News.
- Pompeo and then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin discussed potentially invoking the 25th Amendment to oust Trump after the Capitol attack, according to CNBC and ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl’s book, “Betrayal.” Pompeo has denied having that discussion.
CPAC Shrugs Off Orbán’s Attacks On ‘Race Mixing’
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) organizer Matt Schlapp isn’t all that bothered by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declaring that he wanted to prevent the Hungarian population from becoming a “mixed race,” and still plans on unrolling the red carpet for the anti-democratic leader as a keynote speaker at CPAC anyway.
Anti-Marriage Equality Bill GOPer Gave Speech At Son’s Gay Wedding
Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) apparently didn’t just go to his son’s gay wedding three days after he joined 156 other House Republicans to vote against protections for same-sex marriage: He also gave a heartfelt speech at the wedding, per new audio published by Buzzfeed News.
- Thompson’s speech sounded unambiguously supportive of his son’s marriage, with the GOP lawmaker saying that when parents watch their kids grow up, “[w]e love it when they find their one true love, especially when they become a part of our families,” and that his family was “blessed” to include the new son-in-law.
- Thompson had voted against the marriage equality bill because the legislation was “nothing more than an election-year messaging stunt for Democrats,” his spokesperson said a day after the vote. (Ahem, 47 of his GOP colleagues voted for it.)
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WaPo: Feds Probe Trump Effort To Block 2020 Election
Federal prosecutors are asking witnesses about former President Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election, the Washington Post reports.
Continue reading “WaPo: Feds Probe Trump Effort To Block 2020 Election”Dem Chairs Demand DHS IG Recuse Himself From Probe Into Missing Secret Service Texts
Democratic chairs of the House Oversight and Homeland Security committees are demanding that DHS inspector general Joseph Cuffari recuse himself from the investigation into the deleted Secret Service text messages around the time of the Capitol insurrection, following the Washington Post’s report last week about Cuffari’s months-long delay in informing Congress about the missing messages.
Continue reading “Dem Chairs Demand DHS IG Recuse Himself From Probe Into Missing Secret Service Texts”Where Things Stand: GOPers Really Don’t Want To Go On The Record On Same-Sex Marriage
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters today that he has no plans to weigh in on the bill to codify same-sex marriage into federal law until the measure is brought to the Senate floor.
“I’m not going to make an observation about that until the issue is actually brought up in the Senate,” he said.
It’s a standard delay tactic that other Republicans have used in recent days as Democrats push to pass crucial privacy-related protections into law after the Supreme Court overturned Roe — and to get their Republican colleagues on the record about their stances on important and long-established American rights, like same-sex marriage and access to contraceptive care.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: GOPers Really Don’t Want To Go On The Record On Same-Sex Marriage”Trump Advisors Were Brutally Honest In Private That Fake Electors Were, In Fact, ‘Fake’
A month after Election Day, a lawyer working on Donald Trump’s bid to steal a second term in office was brutally honest — if only in private — about the effort to submit fraudulent slates of Electoral College votes from several states around the country.
Continue reading “Trump Advisors Were Brutally Honest In Private That Fake Electors Were, In Fact, ‘Fake’”The Filibuster Is a Direct Threat to American Democracy
TPM Reader PT notes — and rightly so — that it’s actually remarkable that there are only four Democratic senators expressing any real level of resistance to changing the filibuster rules. That’s a massive sea change from as little as four or five years ago. As I’ve noted, I fully expect Warner and King to give way in short order if their constituents press them. Its really just the two odd men (people) out: Manchin and Sinema. Today and going forward it is impossible for a Democratic candidate to be elected to the Senate anywhere in the United States while supporting the filibuster. It’s anathema among Democrats. But in this post I wanted to step back from the immediate necessity and partisan advantages of ditching or scaling back the filibuster to note how important it is for the future of civic democracy in the United States for the filibuster to be abolished.
Filibuster defenders now usually argue some future advantage. Senator King says that what seems like an obstacle today will be needed as a shield in the future. Filibuster opponents correctly respond that it is folly to believe that the current Republican Party would hesitate for a moment to ditch the filibuster if it represented any meaningful obstacle to getting anything they wanted. They took the wildly unprecedented step of refusing to entertain a Supreme Court nomination for an entire year to steal the seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia. They ditched the filibuster for Supreme Court appointments as soon as they had the chance to pack the Court under Trump. Everything we know about the current GOP tells us it’s folly to believe they’d hesitate.
Continue reading “The Filibuster Is a Direct Threat to American Democracy”Dem Sens Call On GOPers To Go On Record About Support For Right To Contraception
Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Ed Markey (D-MA) on Tuesday demanded that their Republican colleagues go on record about whether they support the right to contraception, a day before Democrats are set to push the Right to Contraception Act through the upper chamber.
Continue reading “Dem Sens Call On GOPers To Go On Record About Support For Right To Contraception”How Polio Crept Back Into The U.S.
This article was originally published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
About a month ago, British health authorities announced they’d found evidence suggesting local spread of polio in London.
It was a jolt, to be sure. The country was declared polio-free in 2003.
But at least no one had turned up sick. The proof came from routine tests of sewage samples, which can alert health officials that a virus is circulating and allow them to intervene quickly. Based on genetic analysis of those samples, officials in the United Kingdom moved to protect the city’s children by reaching out to families with kids under 5 who hadn’t been fully vaccinated.
Polio’s first appearance in almost a decade in the U.S., confirmed late last week by health officials in New York, would play out quite differently.
Continue reading “How Polio Crept Back Into The U.S.”Report: Biden Mulling Extending Student Loan Pause And $10k Forgiveness
President Joe Biden is considering extending the freeze on federal student loan payments that are currently scheduled to resume next month, according to Bloomberg.
Continue reading “Report: Biden Mulling Extending Student Loan Pause And $10k Forgiveness”