Don’t give the cable news outlet too much credit. It’s done little besides the most basic function of a major news outlet during a presidential election — which is, declare a winner when there’s a winner. 

President Trump often enlists the vice president to fight his more serious battles for him.

At the suggestion of TPM Reader JC, I pulled up this article Jane Mayer published in The New Yorker just before the November election. It’s about why and how Trump feared losing – specifically legal vulnerability and crushing debt. But Mayer talked to Michael Cohen, who quite presciently described the aftermath of Trump’s defeat.

There are a few paragraphs about Mayer’s discussion with Trump. But this is the key one.

Much of Trump’s 2020 infrastructure, established solely around the cause-célèbre of President Trump and his reelection, has not made the jump to the President’s post-election crusade to overturn his loss. Instead, that space is being filled by the President himself and a rag-tag band of allies.

A substantial number of states and roughly half the Republicans in the House have now signed on to the Texas lawsuit again against Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. On its face Texas asserts the right to review the voting laws of states Joe Biden won, finds them lacking and asks the Supreme Court to throw out the results in those states.

TPM Reader JG thinks we need at least some partial reappraisal of Bill Barr’s tenure running the DOJ …
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TPM Reader MA flagged something for me last night. Sidney Powell, pardon-play attorney for Mike Flynn and now Trump election steal lawyer, seems to go back a ways in the Trump world. MA notes that she wrote with some frequency in The New York Observer, then owned by Jared Kushner. She even co-bylined one piece on criminal justice reform with Bernard Kerik, a top and perpetual Rudy Giuliani crony in addition to being an ex-con.

The title here is meant as a provocation. But it’s a provocation because it is literally true and really the only way to accurately describe what happened in Washington, DC this weekend at the ‘Stop the Steal’ protests in the capital. There was a major turnout by the Proud Boys and they vandalized multiple historically black churches in the city. In many cases the attacks were on various ‘Black Lives Matter’ installations on church grounds.

Here’s video of one such incident.

The Trump administration is setting some pretty lofty expectations for when Americans can actually expect to see widespread distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. During an interview on the “Today Show” Health and Human Services Secretary Alexander Azar used the platform to suggest that the average American can expect to start seeing widespread distribution of the vaccine — meaning they can get vaccinated at their local pharmacy — by late February or early March.