Crooked Media - What A Day: Loose Ellipse sink ships

Another day, another roundup of everything that has come to light from January 6 investigations. 
 

• Steve Banon—the man of the hour with the skin texture of a basalt rock—passed on the chance to call witnesses or testify in his own defense in his contempt-of-Congress trial. This forfeiture clears the way for jury deliberations to begin. Bannon’s lawyer read a statement declaring that he wouldn’t be testifying because the judge had ruled out most of the defenses he was planning to use, including an assertion of executive privilege by former president Trump. Bannon faces up to a year in prison for each of the two misdemeanor contempt charges at issue in the case: one year for failing to testify and another for failing to deliver any of the documents the committee requested.
   

• Speaking of failure to deliver subpoenaed information, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general reportedly knew all the way back in February that the Secret Service had deleted all text messages from January 5 and 6, knowing they would be subpoenaed, but said nothing. Now even the watchdogs need watchdogs. A criminal investigation of the deleted text messages is underway to determine whether the Secret Service violated federal records-keeping laws. This leaves a gap in the record that the committee is trying to fill, particularly the 187 minutes between Trump’s speech on the Ellipse on January 6 before protesters marched to the Capitol and his remarks later that afternoon from the Rose Garden when he finally told the rioters to go home. 
   

• Garrett Ziegler, a former White House aide to Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro, met with the January 6 committee on Tuesday, likely regarding an alleged meeting where then-President Trump's outside allies tried to convince him to declare martial law and use the military to seize voting machines to steal the election. Tale as old as time. After his testimony, Ziegler, 26, livestreamed antisemitic conspiracy theories and used sexist, profane language to attack former Trump White House aides Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah Griffin, calling them “total hoes and thots,” which, on top of everything else, is redundant! C’mon, man! Ziegler also accused the January 6 committee of orchestrating a “Bolshevistic, anti-White campaign.” For those of you following at home, that’s how racists think smart people talk!

Thanks to a deluge of new information, the committee’s vice chair, Liz Cheney, signaled that more hearings might continue later on this year, but all of their work so far has teed up tonight’s prime-time hearings. 
 

• The committee plans to paint a cohesive picture of Trump’s dereliction of duty, with audio and video evidence, as well as live testimony from two former White House officials, to hammer home the conclusion that Trump was the “sole person” who could have stopped the invasion of the Capitol, and he chose not to. 
   

• Cheney told the New York Times that she believes her work as vice chair of the committee is “the most important thing I’ve ever done professionally and maybe the most important thing I ever do.” Cheney’s ostracism from the mainstream Republican Party reflects how unconditionally millions of Americans still support Trump. She is likely to lose her seat. The Arizona Republican Party voted to censure state House Speaker Rusty Bowers for testifying against Trump to the committee.

Tonight will be the last of the initial committee hearings, but the Republican Party that was so taken with Trump and has clung desperately to the Big Lie is one that clearly isn’t going away.

On the latest episode of Pod Save America: Joe Manchin f***s over the planet while Democrats try to make progress without him. Plus, former Republican strategist Tim Miller joins the pod to talk about his new book that explains why so many of his friends and colleagues went full-MAGA.

Listen to new episodes of Pod Save America Tuesdays and Thursdays wherever you get your podcasts.

Two UNDER THE RADARs in a row about corporate giant Amazon: what are they, a menace to society or something? Yes, obviously. Today, Amazon announced that it reached an agreement to acquire a network of primary care clinics called One Medical in a $3.9 billion deal, giving the company an even bigger footprint in the health-care industry. Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services was quoted as saying (ominously), “We think health care is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention.” Amazon launched a primary and urgent-care service to treat its employees in 2019, but One Medical is a far larger operation with 8,500 corporate clients. The year before, Amazon spent $753 million to buy the start-up PillPack, an online pharmacy. There are a few reasons why this is so concerning. One is that Amazon has a history of playing fast-and-loose with customer data privacy, and handing over medical records to the company raises serious alarm. Another, of course, is that the company is swallowing up the whole goddamn world. Since 1998, Amazon has bought 112 companies, many of them already huge corporations themselves like PillPack and Whole Foods Market. This is why antitrust legislation matters, and most importantly, has to be enforced. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) ran for president on a plan to “Break Up Big Tech” and she’s still at it, but a package of congressional antitrust bills is going nowhere, and tech giants like Amazon can keep throwing lobbyists at the problem.

President Biden has COVID-19, but he’s fine. Everybody calm down.

The number of Americans who filed new claims for unemployment benefits reached an eight-month high, but still remains below a level where it would signal a larger problem for the job market. 

Frustrated with CDC, the Biden Administration announced the creation of a new agency that would lead the country’s pandemic and health-emergencies response called the Administration of Strategic Preparedness and Response, or ASPR. They maybe should have workshopped that name, but otherwise it seems like a great idea.

Monarch butterflies are now considered endangered, and the entire species is “on the edge of collapse,” after years of rising temperatures and habitat destruction. 

Two men were indicted yesterday for their roles in the deaths of 53 migrants, including three children, found in the back of a tractor-trailer in San Antonio last month. 

Former Minneapolis, MN, police officer Thomas Lane was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison after being convicted on federal civil-rights charges for failing to intervene when fellow officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in front of him. 

With an eye toward 2024, former Vice President Mike Pence is distancing himself from disgraced former president Trump. Because Pence wants voters to know that he’s terrible but for different reasons. 

New York state health officials reported the first case of polio in the U.S. in nearly a decade. Anti-vaxxers: let us know how “doing your own research,” is going!

Ahead of his visit to the country on Saturday, Indigenous groups in Canada are asking Pope Francis to return thousands of artifacts made by Indigenous people around the world currently on display in a Vatican museum, which the Vatican claims were gifts to Pope Pius XI. Ah yes, the classic “It was a gift for Pope Pius XI,” defense. 

President Biden announced an expansion of existing federal programs like FEMA to help Americans cope with the extreme heat caused by climate change, falling far short on the kinds of executive action he hinted at when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) killed his larger climate initiatives. This, coupled with the June Supreme Court ruling to limit the EPA’s authority to regulate climate-warming pollution from power plants, is a particularly crushing blow. Speaking in Somerset, MA, Biden stressed the “existential threat” climate change poses to the U.S. and the whole world, saying “This is an emergency, an emergency, and I will look at it that way.” But the actions Biden announced yesterday will do nothing to help the U.S. cut emissions. They seek to deal with the symptoms, not the disease. Measures like expanding FEMA’s reach and building community cooling centers are great and necessary when one-in-three Americans are under heat advisory warnings, but get us no closer to Biden’s goal of cutting planet-warming emissions in half by 2030. Despite repeating the word “emergency” several times in his speech, Biden hasn’t taken that official step yet, and when asked, he said he’s “running the traps on the ... authority I have” and will “make a decision on that soon.” In absence of congressional action, and with a kneecapped EPA, there’s too much at risk for Biden to do anything but swing for the fences.

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Back in March, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu eliminated the fare for three bus lines that serve predominantly low-income neighborhoods and people of color. As of now, Ridership is up 48 percent.

The House passed the Right to Contraception Act, codifying the right to birth control and other contraceptives, with only eight Republicans joining 220 Democrats. 

A New Zealand-based company announced plans to install more than 6,000 electric vehicle chargers in the state of Florida in the coming months. 

Pennsylvania Senate Democratic nominee John Fetterman started a petition to induct his Republican opponent, TV personality and known charlatan Dr. Mehmet Oz, into the New Jersey Hall of Fame because he, you know, lives in New Jersey, not Pennsylvania.