Fascinating report here from the Times’ Shane Goldmacher. The national GOP — meaning the top DC party committees and leadership PACs — appears to be significantly ramping back support for Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Blake Masters in Arizona and even Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Here’s the Times story and here’s Goldmacher’s Twitter thread, which I at least found easier to follow.

These stories are always a bit hard to interpret and everyone wants to jump forward with tendentious interpretations. Basically the top Senate party committee canceled a bunch of ad buy reservations in these states. Some of it is an effort to redeploy spending to less regulated parts of the campaign finance ecosystem, away from joint campaigns and hybrid spends. Some of these spending channels require the campaign to put up a minimum percentage of the spend in hard money. But the campaigns themselves are struggling financially. So they can’t afford their part.

Jack Goldsmith has a lengthy discussion at the Lawfare Blog of whether Attorney General Garland was right to seek a search warrant to search and seize records from ex-President Trump’s Florida estate. It is a good discussion, though one might say the very brazenness of Trump’s indifference to the law has a way of rendering precious or quaint any serious and deliberate discussion of potential consequences. Most of Goldsmith’s discussion can be boiled down to this: it all depends on what’s in the documents, just how secret they needed to be and what Trump was planning to do with them. And it’s hard to disagree with that — of course it does. But Goldsmith’s analysis is missing something.

Some interesting and absurd but still noteworthy events overnight. Trump’s representatives, at least for the moment, have settled on a story which is that he had a “standing order” that any and all classified materials he took home with him to the White House residence was “deemed” declassified. So in fact, none of the materials in question are classified and none of it matters. This was announced on Fox as an official statement from Trump’s office by John Solomon, the notorious fake news hustler who is now operating as Trump’s “designated representative” to the National Archives.

We are, we might say, deep in the thick of it. Until recently we heard constantly how there was no accountability for the ex-President, no investigations or prosecutions, of anything tied to the denouement of the Trump presidency, save for the men who actually entered the Capitol complex on January 6th. Now we learn that there are and have been multiple investigations touching on various incidents tied to the end of the Trump presidency. There was a bunch of frothy and nonsensical chatter earlier in the week about how the FBI had just given the presidency back to Donald Trump. This morning the House Freedom Caucus, ground zero of Trumpism and coup plotting, canceled the press conference they had planned to bewail the FBI search of the ex-President’s home. Facts change and you have to react to them.

It is probably best to say that we are back in one of those fugue windows Trump Republicans have, much like January 7th-9th 2021, in which there’s a period of relative silence while a story is devised to explain why something inexplicable and indefensible is in fact awesome and totally fine. They’ll get there.

* Judge tells Rudy Giuliani no dice (sub. req.). He must appear before a Fulton County grand jury next week (Aug. 17th) unless he can provide a better explanation from a doctor about why it is medically impossible for him to do so.

* The Kremlin is paying millions to a notorious American conspiracy theorist, Ben Swann, to create a series of news style TV shows aimed at blackening America’s image around the world. Here’s the FARA filing.

So here we are, an FBI raid on the ex-President’s Florida compound. (Some of you say we are following GOP messaging calling it a “raid” rather than executing a search warrant. They’re both accurate but we’ve always called these “raids” in years of covering these events. So no reason to change now.) Republicans are predictably lining up in defense of the President as the victim of political persecution, threatening payback after January 2023 and January 2025.

But not all of you are punch drunk with schadenfreude. I’ve received a few emails from TPM Readers who fear this is an unfolding catastrophe for Democrats or the country or any opponents of Trumpism. TPM Reader EA finds it hard to believe that Garland, Wray and a federal judge would authorize such a dramatic move over an essentially bureaucratic document retention issue. But he’s been disappointed in DOJ and FBI in recent years and worries. TPM Reader JB is much more concerned, calling it a “PR disaster … because our side has nothing to say … I worry this is Mueller all over again. A cautious technocrat in a China shop.” Others speculate more generally about a bureaucratic drift toward a warrant to seize documents Trump resisted turning over. One step leads to another and suddenly this is where you are but no one has stepped back and figured in the broadly political and constitutional context.

You see the big news. It speaks for itself in terms of its magnitude. We can drown in schadenfreude. But the reality is that this is a massive, massive development with no precedent or parallel in American history. I assume this is about the disposition of classified documents investigation, one of the less serious (in relative terms) of the investigations he faces. But I have no idea. Perhaps it’s tied to the events of January 6th or the conspiracy that preceded it. I don’t know and I’ll be curious to hear whether reporters closer to those investigations have some suspicions or insight.

Last week, TPM’s Matt Shuham spoke to a leading researcher of 2020 election lies and conspiracy theories — who works online under the alias Trapezoid of Discovery — to discuss the years-long effort to sow doubt about the democratic process. Matt and ToD talked about the relationship between election denialism and QAnon, the tech theater that conspiracy theorists use to dress up their ideas, and efforts by some to break into official election machines.

Watch the full briefing now.

I’m sure we’ll have a lot more on this tomorrow. But if I’m understanding this right, the attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel, has just had to recuse herself and ask for a special counsel because the Michigan state police has referred to her a potential felony charge against her general election opponent, Matthew DePerno.

With SALT deductions again — at least momentarily today — at the center of a Senate legislation battle, I wanted to write out in one place why reducing the SALT deduction is terrible policy, even though many progressives don’t seem to realize it. The SALT deduction is the part of the federal tax code that allows you to deduct state and local taxes when calculating your federal tax bill. Critics argue that the benefits go mainly to wealthy and very wealthy people. And that is true as far as it goes. But that’s going to be true in almost any revision of graduated income taxes. The key is that in many blue states it hits a lot of middle and upper middle class families too.

Now, boohoo for them right? Well, if it’s them versus subsidizing people’s out of control insulin costs, sure. But it’s not. That’s not the trade off. Here we get to the myopia of progressive opposition to or lack of support for SALT deductions. The SALT deduction was originally gutted in the 2017 Trump tax cut bill. That was done in part to make up revenue lost by giving huge tax cuts to the extremely wealthy. But that wasn’t the main reason. The authors of the bill correctly believed that gutting the SALT tax was a direct attack on the (mostly) blue states with high-tax/high-service governance. We all know that some states put more into health care, unemployment insurance, education, social services than others — all the basic stuff mostly or partly paid for at the state level. That high-tax/high service model is what’s behind that. States that follow the low-tax/low-service model not only have fewer benefits. They also rely more on federal subsidies to provide what services and benefits they do provide. Which is to say that, in most cases, they rely on transfers from blue states to red states to cover part of the bill for their already stingy social safety nets.