Crooked Media - What A Day: Alito birdie told me

- Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) when asked to name the specific crimes for which Republicans are investigating President Biden.

Editor's note: Crooked is closed for the holidays! We'll be right back in your inbox on January 3, 2024. Wishing you a safe and happy holidays and a wonderful new year! Don't doom scroll, and if George Santos tries to come down your chimney, just say "No thank you."

Thank you for riding with me in 2023. [exhales deeply] What a year.
- Julia

The gap between U.S. officials and the Israeli government continues to widen as the two countries cannot agree on a timeline for Israel to downshift its bombing campaign in Gaza. 
 

• The White House signaled continued discord with Israel on Friday over the timeline to scale down the war in Gaza. President Biden’s national security adviser said the timing was now the subject of “intensive discussion” between the two countries. Multiple global aid organizations have warned of a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and earlier this week Biden said Israel risks losing international support because of “indiscriminate” airstrikes that have killed over 18,000 Palestinian civilians. 
   

• Israeli soldiers in east Gaza City mistakenly shot and killed three hostages that had been captured by Hamas in the October 7 attack, according to a Friday statement from the Israel Defense Forces. Separate from these three hostages, the IDF said on friday that it had removed the bodies of three additional hostages from Gaza taken on October 7, including two soldiers and a 28-year-old man named Elia Toledano. 
   

• Almost half of the munitions Israel has used in Gaza since the war began have been unguided “dumb bombs” according to a new U.S. intelligence assessment. Some arms experts say this helps explain the staggering civilian death toll in the enclave, and adds to the concerns already raised by humanitarian groups and the United Nations. The use of so many unguided bombs is a key concern among those calling for the United States to condition any further military aid to Israel on the immediate reduction of civilian deaths. The Biden administration has rejected such calls thus far, fearing political backlash from powerful pro-Israel lobbying organizations and Republicans in Congress.

White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan conducted several high-level discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top officials on Thursday in an attempt to loosen the diplomatic gridlock.
 

• Gaza suffered through a second day of a near-total communication blackout on Friday, leaving people in the enclave almost entirely cut off from the outside world and each other. The cause of the blackout remains unknown, but is thought to be the result of an expansion of Israel’s ground operations across the north and south. Israeli strikes have severely damaged telecommunications infrastructure in the enclave over the past two months. 
   

• Al-Jazeera cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa became the latest journalist killed in the conflict after a drone struck near a school in Khan Younis on Friday, according to the news organization. The strike also wounded Al-Jazeera’s Gaza Bureau Chief, Wael al-Dahdouh. Al-Dahdouh has suffered unthinkable personal losses since the conflict began, as his wife and their two children were killed in an airstrike in the Nuseirat refugee camp on October 25. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 64 journalists and media workers have been killed covering the Israel-Hamas conflict since October 7. 

Jake Sullivan’s Thursday trip to Tel Aviv was the first of many visits planned by senior officials for the coming days. All of the meetings are, according to The Washington Post, expected to have the same message: Washington wants to change the pace of Israel’s bombing campaign. General Charles Brown Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff arrived in Israel on Friday, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is expected to touch down on Monday.

Last week, Ben stopped by Pod Save The UK for an unfiltered chat with host Nish Kumar, specifically about Boris Johnson’s recent treatment of Former President Obama. Spoiler alert: it was racist. Plus, Nish & Coco discuss Boris’s disappointing testimony in the UK’s ongoing COVID inquiry. Catch both conversations on Pod Save The World's YouTube, out now!

The New York Times published a massive investigation into the monumental 2022 Dobbs decision to end the federal right to abortion. The paper used internal documents, contemporaneous notes, and interviews with people close to the Supreme Court to reveal a narrative as illuminating as it is infuriating. The details show just how much maneuvering the conservative justices pulled off to achieve the five-decade-old dream of the anti-choice movement. Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the court delay announcing its decision to hear the case for months, in an effort to give the appearance of distance from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. The idea was to signal that the justices were still debating whether to take the case, even though it was already cleared. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Stephen Breyer (one conservative, the other liberal) worked on their newest colleagues —Justices Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—to withdraw support for hearing the case. Breyer was then 82, and appealed to his relatively much younger colleagues not to lose public trust in the court with one of their first major cases. So much for that!

We all remember when Politico published a leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in May 2022. At the time, Chief Justice Roberts was still working on a concurring opinion that he had hoped would persuade his colleagues to take a middle-ground position. Behind the scenes, the leak greatly hampered any hope of a compromise and helped lock in conservative unity. Many of the court’s conservative justices moved to eliminate in-person opinion announcements, a practice favored by Justice Ginsburg, particularly oral dissents. The tradition very narrowly survived with Kavanaugh siding with the liberal justices and Chief Justice Roberts. A year and a half later, it is still unclear who leaked the Dobbs decision, but we certainly wouldn’t put it past Alito!

The Biden administration handed a major victory to the all-powerful U.S. corn lobby by announcing on Friday that it will recognize an ethanol industry methodology in guidance to companies looking to claim tax credits for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).   

Former FBI official Charles McGonigal was sentenced to over four years in prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to working for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is under U.S. sanctions. Prosecutors have called Deripaska Vladimir Putin’s “henchman.”

A London court ruled in favor of Prince Harry on Friday in a landmark lawsuit that he pursued against a British tabloid that hacked his phone. 

The What A Day podcast named the late healthcare activist Ady Barkan as their Person of the Year. Listen to the full episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. 

The U.S. economy is technically strong, but many Americans are not feeling good about their own economic standing. One culprit? Housing prices that just won’t fall. 

An annual “Electeds of Color Holiday Party” has been hosted annually in Boston politics for over a decade. No one complained until this year, now that the city has its first non-white Mayor, Michelle Wu. Funny how that happens!!!

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Disgraced former Mayor and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was ordered to pay two Georgia poll workers $148 million on Friday after a jury ruled he falsely accused them of helping to steal the 2020 presidential election from disgraced former president Donald Trump. It’s the most wonderful time of the year!!!

A federal appeals court denied a request to delay a Judge’s decision that North Dakota’s legislative map violates the Voting Rights Act. The judge ruled that the state must redraw its districts after the initial map submitted was found to dilute the voting strength of two Native American tribes. 

A different federal appeals court upheld a decision to force the Louisiana State Legislature to redraw its congressional map after the map it submitted was found to dilute the power of the state’s Black voters. It seems like every year we have to tell Republican legislatures: “Hey! Racial gerrymandering is still illegal!

The Congressional Budget Office is now projecting that the U.S. economy will pull off a “soft landing” in 2024, avoiding a recession.