I don’t know the precise timing and angle. But I fully agree this is worth going on offense. I hadn’t focused enough on the claim the President didn’t remember when his son died. Personal, gratuitous, callous, denigrating, almost certainly not true. From a longtime TPM Reader …

First off, Merrick Galrland is a disastrously bad AG.  He has appointed special counsels he never should have.  And he had no business allowing a report to be released that violated DOJ guidelines.  Most of all, his two years of fruitless propitiatory delay moving on the elite insurrectionists has America and the world on the doorstep of disaster.

Let me share a few thoughts on the Biden special counsel report.

First off, this is another example of the universal rule: Republican special counsels are chosen to investigate Democrats. And Republican special counsels are chosen to investigate Republicans. It may not have been a great idea for Merrick Garland to have a two-time Trump appointee investigate Joe Biden. But here we are. Robert Hur totally slimed Biden with these gratuitous comments about his mental acuity and memory, referring to him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Even if you assume they are the product of a good faith evaluation they are still wildly inappropriate.

DOJ guidelines make clear that if you’re not bringing charges you don’t bash the subject of the investigation in your announcement (a la James Comey). You certainly aren’t supposed to affirmatively attempt to demean the subject of the investigation with clearly political attacks that aren’t even related to what you’re investigating. Hur might as well have called him “Fake News Joe Biden.” It’s really that transparent and that bad.

Our team will be live-blogging today’s SCOTUS Trump ballot disqualification hearing here. The hearing is scheduled to start at 10 AM.

I wrote earlier that I doubted Speaker Mike Johnson was in any trouble. Because the kind of people who fire GOP Speakers don’t think any of this clown show is a problem. I think this is obvious. But in case you had any doubt, Freedom Caucus dead-ender Clay Higgins tweeted this afternoon that far from being a clownish failure Johnson is more like an Iron Age hero walking right off the pages of Homer. “Mike Johnson is enduring withering attacks from every faction. Iron sharpeneth iron. He’s getting stronger.”

So there you go. Mike Johnson is likely just fine.

Truly remarkable. After a year of threatening, House Republicans finally voted to impeach DHS Secretary Mayorkas. And they failed. It’s just basic vote counting. And they failed. Then their standalone Israel bill failed too.

I’m a little unclear on what comes next. Steve Scalise was apparently not there because of his on-going treatment for cancer. It was unclear whether Rep. Al Green would be there but he was. He was apparently wheeled in from the hospital. I’d heard suggestions that they’ll hold another vote. But unless I’m missing something adding Scalise’s vote won’t change the result.

Doesn’t really matter. It’s the pratfalls that are the most amazing part of this.

Late Update: Apparently one additional Republican flipped from Yes to No after it became clear the impeachment would fail. This is procedural move which allows the vote to be held again. It also means that the “real” vote was 215-215, rather than 214-216. Thus Scalise returning and voting Yes would put it over the top.

Okay, this is getting … well, interesting? It’s now 100% clear the border deal is dead. In my first post an hour or so ago it was 98% dead. The ambiguity has now been removed. That’s no big surprise.

What’s at least a bit surprising is the next move. Republicans are now at least saying that Plan B is to strip out all the border stuff and leave in the aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. But the key to remember is that that is how we got here in the first place. Democrats were trying to move an aid bill and Republicans said no aid without a border crackdown. Democrats at first refused linkage but eventually gave way. Then they negotiated this border deal. Now Senate Republicans, at least for the moment, are saying they’ll go back to the aid bill they refused if it didn’t address the border.

LOL.

New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella announced today that Deep Fake voter suppression robocalls aimed at dissuading voters from voting in last months Democratic primary have been traced to a Texas-based firm called Life Corporation, owned by a man named Walter Monk. The calls used a voice like President Biden’s and told voters not to “waste” their vote in the primary, implying that you could vote in the primary or the general election but not both.

Monk seems to have a long and pretty sordid history of low-rent robocall type operations, but at least on first pass not a clear history of involvement in politics.