Crooked Media - What A Day: Bretter late than never

House Democrats made a simple, logical decision to reject vocal Big Lie promoters from the January 6 committee they had already pledged to sabotage. Unfortunately, many of the people tasked with contextualizing that decision for the public woke up from long-term comas on Wednesday.
 

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to seat Reps. Jim Banks (R-IN) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) on a panel investigating an insurrection they proudly supported has triggered a tidal wave of Bad Media Takes, from CNN’s Chris Cilizza’s assertion that it “dooms even the possibility of the committee being perceived as bipartisan” (the committee remains objectively bipartisan), to Politico Playbook’s analysis that Democrats taking steps to prevent the GOP’s loudest liars from derailing a critical investigation has somehow armed them with “a legitimate grievance.” 
   
• For any of that framing to make sense, you’d have to Eternal Sunshine yourself of the knowledge that Republicans had already filibustered an independent, bipartisan commission, and that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is so committed to a coverup that he threatened to strip any Republican who accepted Pelosi’s invitation to participate in the investigation of their other committee assignments. You’d also have to overlook the crazypants statements of the vetoed appointees themselves, like Banks’s Monday pledge to investigate the “responses from Capitol leadership and the Biden administration.” As Pelosi astutely noted on Thursday, “There was no Biden administration on January 6.”
   
• While political reporters do the country a serious disservice by lamenting the Unprovoked Murder of Bipartisanship, Pelosi is considering appointing a second Republican, Rep. Adam Kinziger (R-IL), to the committee. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said she would support that addition. The committee announced its senior staff on Thursday, but the minority will have its own team, possibly to include former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA). It would be juvenile to use this as an opportunity to bring up Riggleman’s Bigfoot erotica collection, so we won’t. Riggleman’s documented interest in Bigfoot erotica is simply not relevant here.

The committee is scheduled to hold its first hearing next week, and its chairman has said that “nothing is off limits” in the investigation.
 

• Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) confirmed this week that he plans to investigate Donald Trump as part of the probe, and is prepared to depose senior Trump administration officials and members of Congress who might have played a role in the insurrection—like, say, the two seditionist Jims that McCarthy tried to put on the other side of the table. Thompson also indicated that the committee is very interested in learning more about McCarthy’s panicky phone call to Trump as the attack unfolded, which probably has nothing to do with McCarthy’s panicky efforts to thwart the investigation.
   
• Democrats aren’t ready to boldly counter all forms of GOP obstruction just yet. During a CNN town hall on Wednesday night, President Biden said that as much as the filibuster sucks ass (paraphrasing), eliminating it entirely would “throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done.” (You know, by contrast to the relentless legislative juggernaut we have now.) On the bright side, Biden did voice his strong support for a return to a talking filibuster, and said he might be willing to go further if the filibuster causes total gridlock. (The For The People Act would like a word.)

It’s critical that Democrats treat the GOP like the radicalized group it is, and not just on a piecemeal basis. But it’s just as important for mainstream media to be prepared to tell that story truthfully: When one party wants to investigate an effort to overthrow the government and the other doesn’t because it was actively involved, a “both sides” interpretation of the conflict isn’t just laughably obsolete, it’s dangerous. 

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Hey, you know that 2018 FBI investigation into Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual misconduct that seemed like a big weird sham? Turns out it was a big weird sham. The FBI told Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Chris Coons (D-DE), who requested more information about the big-weird-sham vibes in 2019, that it referred the most compelling of the 4,500 tips it received about Kavanaugh to the Trump White House. We can safely assume that White House lawyers set those tips on fire, and the FBI hinted that it never bothered to follow up on its own, since this was a background check and not a criminal investigation. Whitehouse and six other Democrats have written back to the FBI demanding more details about its agreement with the White House, and on how the tips were handled. Whitehouse has also asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to look into Kavanaugh’s pile of credit card debt that mysteriously vanished before his confirmation. 

• Mississippi has asked the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in order to uphold its law that would ban most abortions after just 15 weeks of pregnancy. Could be cool to do a real investigation into the Court’s resident beer fan before he helps the conservative bloc oblige!
   
• Pennsylvania has become the second state to decertify a county’s voting system after GOP state senators sent an unqualified private company to paw at it in search of imaginary fraud. 
   
• Former Rep. Abby Finkenauer (D-IA) has launched a Senate bid against Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
   
• Federal prosecutors had enough evidence to indict former Trump advisor Tom Barrack on foreign-lobbying charges last year, but held off until President Biden took office. The Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Brooklyn at the time reportedly “expressed misgivings” about the case. 
   
• Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez has sued the paper and its former top editor for discrimination for banning her from covering stories on sexual assault after she spoke publicly about being a sexual-assault survivor.
   
• Some Southern California cities have begun looking into setting up their own health departments rather than comply with Los Angeles County’s reinstated mask mandate.
   
• Olympic organizers have fired the director of the opening ceremony over a Holocaust joke he made in 1998, Tokyo is recording nearly 2,000 new coronavirus cases a day right before the games begin, and an American paralympic swimmer was forced to withdraw after being denied a personal care assistant. Other than that, everything’s going according to plan.
   
• China has rejected the WHO’s plan for further investigation of the origins of COVID-19, because it called for further study of the lab-leak theory.
   
• A group of scientists found some novel ancient viruses frozen in ice samples from the Tibetan Plateau and we are asking very politely that they put them back.
   
• The less you know about this going in, the better a time you will have. Like any relationship, getting the most out of this newsletter requires trust.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) has introduced legislation that would hold tech companies responsible for vaccine misinformation and other harmful false medical claims on their platforms, since asking them nicely to Do Better doesn’t seem to do the trick. The bill would create an exception to Section 230, which shields tech companies from being held liable for the content their users post—but only in situations where a social media platform’s algorithm promotes misinformation related to an “existing public-health emergency.” (If a platform ranks posts neutrally, by chronology rather than algorithmically, they’d still be protected from liability.) As the war on misinformation rages on, this is a great thread on what anti-vax content on Facebook actually looks like: Groups use coded language to evade bans, in the same way that extremists have operated on Facebook for years. It’s not right out in the open, but there’s also no excuse for Facebook not to be ready for it.

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The Missouri Supreme Court has overturned a lower-court ruling that allowed the GOP-controlled legislature to gut a voter-approved Medicaid expansion. 

The House has voted overwhelmingly to increase the number of visas for Afghans who helped American troops. 

The Senate Armed Services Committee has incorporated Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's (D-NY) measure overhauling the prosecution of major military crimes, including sexual assault, in the annual defense bill.

A Tennessee panel has voted to remove a bust of a Confederate general and early KKK leader from the state Capitol this week, after years of protests.