The mystery of that three-page document continues and even seems to be picking up steam. I mentioned the gist in this earlier post here. The question is just what concessions Kevin McCarthy made to the Freedom Caucus to become speaker? It came up at a GOP conference meeting today. And apparently some details were revealed but not others. Indeed, there seemed to be some disagreement about whether it’s actually written down at all. Or, rather, there was disagreement about whether there is a mystery three-page document and then yet other commitments that weren’t even included in the three-page document. These latest details come from Axios’s afternoon email.

The House GOP has passed its rules package and now the 118th Congress in the House is off to the races. But the rules package was never where McCarthy’s real concessions resided. The rules package wasn’t what signed control of the House over to the Freedom Caucus. That was contained in informal promises where McCarthy agreed to cede control over the committee that schedules votes, where he committed to backing the Freedom Caucus’s debt default plans and more.

I had assumed these were verbal agreements over hand shakes. But apparently not. According to the insider sheet Punchbowl News, in addition to the 55-page rules package hashed out between McCarthy’s supporters and the Freedom Caucus, there was an additional, secret three-page document spelling out the real agreement.

From Punchbowl …

The Post’s Ishaan Tharoor has an interesting rundown of differences and similarities between the events of Jan. 8 in Brazil and Jan. 6 two years ago. The fundamental difference, which any expert would have told you in advance, is the role of the Brazilian military and security services. Less than 40 years ago, Brazil was under military rule. Military rule is not some fantastical dystopia there. It’s the reality that most of the country’s political class grew up in.

Brazil’s insurrectionists had studied Jan. 6 closely. You can see that in so many of the visuals. But there was a key difference. The focus of the insurrectionists’ plan, in advance and on the day of, was to build support within the military. They camped out around military bases. They tried to build links to military factions. Nor was this some vain hope. It’s generally agreed that the military and security services were and are sympathetic to Bolsonaro. But political sympathy is not the same as a willingness to intervene to overthrow the political order. Tom Shannon, a former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, told Tharoor: “The Bolsonaro people had really studied January 6 and the conclusion that they came to was that Trump failed because he relied on a mob and that he had no institutional support.” Institutional support, in this case, being the army and the police.

In the few hours we weren’t furiously updating our liveblog covering the lawless speakership election each day last week, I spent most of my downtime answering texts and explaining to friends what exactly was happening on the House floor.