Crooked Media - What A Day: Roberts's rules

 -Chris "Dinner Plans" Coons, angling for clout

With respect to The Plot To Overthrow the Government and What To Do About It, coup planners and their enablers keep trying to cover up the full story of January 6, while elevating as many purveyors of the Big Lie as possible into positions of authority over elections. You emphatically do not love to see it.

• The House January 6 Committee admitted temporary defeat, of a sort, to a panel of three Trump-appointed DC circuit court judges, who have temporarily blocked their efforts to obtain the Republican Party’s email-marketing data from the company Salesforce. Their intervention will make it impossible for the committee to obtain proprietary information—about how (and how well) the RNC used lies about the 2020 election to raise money and mobilize would-be insurrectionists—ahead of scheduled public hearings in June. “That information,” the committee explained, will now “only be useful for additional hearings later this year and/or for an ensuing final Select Committee report recommending legislative action." 
   
• Former Trump White House trade adviser (and coup plotter) Peter Navarro also appears to be in some kind of legal hot water, though it’s unclear whether it stems from his participation in the attempted coup, his defiance of a January 6 committee subpoena, or both. Navarro claims in a rambling complaint that “two FBI special agents banged loudly on my door in the early morning hours” of May 26, and presented him with a grand jury subpoena. That would normally suggest prosecutors want evidence from him in a broader criminal probe, but he also claims the same subpoena ordered him to comply with the initial congressional subpoena. Navarro also writes, “While I am not a lawyer, I’m not without legal expertise,” which may explain the confusion here.
   
• Meanwhile the House Republicans who’ve been subpoenaed by the January 6 committee are trying to walk a dilatory line between outright refusal and minimal compliance in order to make sure they can conceal their evidence from House investigators without triggering any legal action or setting a precedent that would prohibit them from subpoenaing Democrats in the future. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) responded in bad faith to their subpoenas by demanding information from the committee, without refusing to testify outright.

Republicans would seemingly rather have coup supporters sitting in charge of elections rather than in depositions. 

• Prominent coup lawyer Cleta Mitchell, for instance, is working with “a well-funded network of organizations on the right, including the Republican National Committee… recruiting election conspiracists into an organized cavalry of activists monitoring elections.” In other words, the MAGA movement is spending many millions of dollars to harass career election workers and make the impartial administration of elections impossible.
   
• In the realm of electoral politics, the new poll leader for the Michigan GOP gubernatorial nomination is a random real-estate agent from Allendale named Ryan Kelley, who participated in the insurrection on January 6, and was filmed among “a mob that muscled past Capitol police into restricted areas.”

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It’s become more difficult than it already was to make sense of how well Ukraine’s resistance to Russian invaders is holding up. In recent days (or even hours) Russia has captured more parts of the strategically significant Donbas city of Severodonetsk, and over the past few weeks, analysts say Russia has made small but concerning inroads elsewhere eastern Ukraine. But American defense officials (who have never been wrong) say the bigger picture is one of plodding Russian advancement that has further demoralized invading forces and caused them to repeat the same mistakes that left them no choice but to abandon their larger war aims. The U.S. says it plans to provide Ukraine with precision-guided rocket systems to help tip the balance once again, and perhaps allow Ukraine to reclaim lost territory.

• President Biden laid out his plan for reducing inflation, which includes legislative proposals to reduce health-care and energy costs, and reduce the deficit through tax increases on the wealthy (Build Back Better, Better, if you will) and met with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to discuss the Fed’s more direct efforts. 
   
• Annualized inflation in Eurozone countries hit 8.1 percent in May, a reminder that inflation is a global problem, not unique to the United States or Biden administration. 
   
• Special Counsel John Durham’s sham prosecution of Democratic attorney David Sussman—a MAGA-endorsed abuse of power to mislead the public about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia—ended in a humiliating acquittal. 
   
• Uvalde, TX, police (as in, the whole department) have ceased cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety investigation of last week’s school massacre, and the scandalous police response to it.
   
• Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced that the Canadian government will ban the sale of handguns, in a reminder that doing things is possible.  
   
• Wyoming Trump loyalists booed Kevin McCarthy during his pre-recorded video address to a MAGA rally in support of Harriet Hageman, who’s running against Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) in the GOP House primary.  
   
• Conservative elites in Colombia have begun lining up behind Federico Gutiérrez, a far-right presidential candidate who once described himself as an acolyte of Adolf Hitler, after Gutiérrez defeated his establishment-conservative rival, teeing up a run-off between himself and Gustavo Petro, a left-wing senator and former rebel. (Mitch McConnell silently nods.)
   
• Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was arrested and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol in Napa County over the weekend.  
   
• Mona Lisa was attacked with cake, but fortunately sustained no injuries.

Chief Justice John Roberts has begun turning the screws on the Supreme Court’s clerks, in an escalation of the court’s internal investigation of who leaked its draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. The probe will reportedly include a review of the clerks’ cell-phone data, and require them to sign affidavits, presumably attesting to their non-involvement in the leak. That extraordinary intrusion has some clerks contemplating whether they should retain legal representation, but strikes court-watchers as conveniently limited. After all, no reporting suggests that any of the justices themselves have been or will be placed under the same microscope, even against a backdrop of extraordinary ethical breaches by Justice Clarence Thomas, and his wife, the well-connected right-wing activist Ginni Thomas.

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The European Union has agreed in principle to ban 90 percent of Russian oil imports by the end of the year. 

Teenagers are big winners of the economic recovery, with huge employment gains and rising wages for the first time since before the 2008 financial crisis. 

Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) has introduced sweeping (by American standards) new gun-control legislation “that would tighten New York's gun laws, close loopholes and directly address the gaps in our laws exposed by the horrific shootings in Buffalo, Texas, and around the country.”

The Supreme Court (yes, that one) has temporarily blocked enforcement of an egregiously unconstitutional Texas law (designed seemingly to restore Donald Trump to Twitter) that seeks to bar major social-media companies from removing political content of just about any kind.