Crooked Media - What A Day: Über schmuck

Today's House January 6 hearing was unlucky number seven if you’re Donald Trump, and your goal is to avoid prosecution, or if you’re Attorney General Merrick Garland and your goal is to forget Donald Trump exists; and that’s before we learned that Trump has been on a one-man witness-tampering expedition.

• Let's start at the end: The committee closed its proceedings by revealing that after the last hearing, former president Trump attempted to contact a witness who has been in contact with the panel. Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney said that they “take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously,” and had notified the Justice Department. 
   
• The committee also had allll the goods on a batshit meeting between Trump and his inner circle in December 2020. That meeting, which included Sidney Powell, her client former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, and the Overstock.com guy (?) Patrick Byrne first came to light earlier this year, but today’s hearing illustrated that it was even more unhinged than previously thought. A sworn deposition from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone detailed that Flynn suggested Trump invoke martial law. Another adviser present at the meeting suggested he issue an executive order that would permit the government to access and “inspect” voting machines (of which they drafted more than one). The coup plotters also wanted DOJ to appoint Powell special counsel to investigate “voter fraud.” Cipollone rebuffed all of it. A few witnesses said participants almost came to physical blows. 
   
• At another meeting days later on December 21, 2020, 10 sitting members of Congress and Trump discussed pressuring then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results. Many who attended that meeting also later asked for presidential pardons, whaddya know! All of this is to say that star witness Pat Cipollone corroborated virtually all earlier testimony from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. After Hutchinson’s testimony, Trump and his goons began an immediate smear campaign trying to undermine her credibility, but the added deposition of a senior official like Cipollone will make her evidence much more difficult for them to refute. The committee further underscored the desperate measures Trump sought after learning he lost the election with text messages and photographs indicating that longtime Trump advisers Flynn and Roger Stone were in contact with leaders of violent right-wing extremist groups the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Members from the groups also testified today before the committee that they were essentially acting on Trump’s orders following his “Stop The Steal” rally. 

Two even more unexpected pieces of evidence came to light today as well.

• Social media giant Twitter enjoyed a lot of moral grandstanding after kicking Donald Trump off his favorite platform on January 8, 2021, but a former company employee testified to the committee that the network was never acting with best or even good intentions. In fact, the new sworn deposition states that Twitter gave former president Trump more lenient treatment than other users because the company enjoyed the “power” he lent to them by tweeting constantly to a massive audience of 88 million followers—even though company officials realized his tweets might lead to violence. 
   
• The committee also obtained an undated draft tweet from the National Archives, which had he posted it, would have explicitly directed his followers to march to the Capitol after his speech on the Ellipse. It was marked with a stamp indicating that Trump had seen the draft, further adding to the mounting evidence that the president’s violent call to action was not spontaneous, but was rather a coordinated, deliberate plan. Further still, Mother Jones obtained audio of Trump adviser Steve Bannon bragging before election day(!) that even if Trump lost, he would declare himself the winner.

On the latest episode of Hot Take, Amy and Mary sit down with Leah Litman, a law professor and host of Strict Scrutiny, to talk about SCOTUS, aka the most hated reality TV show in America. They discuss the overturning of Roe v. Wade, WV v. EPA, Ted Cruz’s slimy finances, and the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) who are behind many of these awful rulings.

Listen to new episodes of Hot Take every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.

A new leak of over 100,000 records from Uber a dizzying array of malpractice ranging in severity from highly-frowned-upon to straight-up illegal. Of course, they played the usual hits: Uber evaded paying millions of dollars in taxes by channeling money through Bermuda and other tax havens, then tried to deflect attention from their own illegal dalliances by scrupulously documenting the income of their (often underpaid) drivers and handing them over to authorities. They lobbied political leaders around the world to help undermine worker rights, further avoid taxes, and expand Uber’s global footprint. But what’s more unique and nefarious about Uber’s misdeeds is their use of technology, such as a "kill switch" that blocked authorities' access to their servers in a number of countries and prevented them from seizing documents during raids of company offices. They also used their tech to identify police and government officials who were ordering cars undercover to obtain information. 

Uber’s reps argue that all of this is in the past, that the entire company culture and practices changed when chief sexual harassment officer founder Travis Kalanick was forced out as CEO in 2017. But if you can believe it, there’s very little evidence supporting that claim! Uber’s war against its own drivers continues to this day. In 2020, Uber and Lyft spent $200 million bankrolling the passage of Prop 22 in California (the most expensive ballot initiative in the state’s history), which secured an exemption from the state law requiring them to classify drivers as employees, complete with all associated employee protections and benefits. The company is well known for union-busting, and again tried to persuade the public that its employees are definitely not employees by recently launching an “It’s not a job, it’s a gig,” ad campaign. No amount of attempted rebranding will ever be able to counteract Uber’s reams of corporate practices so exploitative they would bring a tear of pride to John D. Rockefeller’s eye.

• A judge has ordered Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to testify in front of a special grand jury in Georgia regarding his connection to Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
   
• Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) released a new ad that will appear exclusively on Fox News in the hopes of edging out Trump-endorsed faux-populist (i.e. racist) GOP nominee J.D. Vance in the upcoming Ohio Senate race. Historically, Republicans of the Fox News variety are not often swayed by the “I’m one of the good ones,” approach, but we wish Rep. Ryan all the best!
   
• Since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe vs. Wade, more men who live in states with abortion bans are seeking vasectomies. Thanks for your allyship, fellas!
   
• Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit Tehran next week, shortly after the U.S. warned that Iran could provide Russia with drones to use in its war against Ukraine. 
   
• The Austin American-Statesman obtained a 77-minute video showing the significantly delayed police response to the Uvalde shooting at Robb Elementary School. 
   
• First Lady Dr. Jill Biden issued an apology after inadvertently (?) comparing the Latino community to breakfast tacos. 
   
• Twitter is suing Elon Musk to make him buy the company which he, you know, very much agreed to buy. 
   
• In an (extremely funny) instance of Republican friendly fire from way back in 2012, former president George W. Bush privately dissed then-Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) to Mitt Romney: “People thought I was dumb. Well, wait till you get a load of this guy.” A who-is-dumber Sophie's Choice for the ages!

The Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee (a committee within a committee?! The DNC is wild.) met over the weekend to consider any significant calendar changes to the primary and general-election schedule before members take an official vote in early August. Among them might be a shakeup to the typical state-by-state order that the Democratic presidential primaries usually follow. Nevada Democrats are aggressively campaigning for their state to cast the first ballots in the 2024 primary, which many believe would be a much-needed update to the schedule. Typically, the New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucuses are first, but since they play such an outsized role in determining which candidates are viable in subsequent primaries, many Democratic voters believe that the first primary should more accurately reflect the demographics of the party’s base. Iowa and New Hampshire, both of which are mostly rural and overwhelmingly white, do not reflect the average Democratic voter (or even the average American for that matter). Moreover, Nevada's strong union influence offers Democrats a chance to fortify a crucial constituency early in the calendar.

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A federal judge in Phoenix blocked Arizona’s “Personhood Law” that would have given even a fertilized egg all the legal rights of a living person, which was reportedly intended to persecute providers and patients.  
 

Gov. Tom Wolf (D-PA) signed an executive order today protecting patients who travel to Pennsylvania for abortion from being prosecuted by their home states.

In completely adorable news, conservationist Jane Goodall will be honored with her own Barbie, complete with binoculars, a field notebook, and a small chimpanzee friend.

NASA released the first batch of photos of deep space from the James Webb Space Telescope, and they are mind-alteringly cool. 

Despite his publicity tour around the country mulling over a re-election campaign, half of Republican voters say they wouldn’t vote for Trump in the 2024 primary.