Crooked Media - What A Day: Bennie and the threats

Steve Bannon has formally told the House January 6 committee to take its subpoena and shove it, setting up a showdown that will end with either Bannon in handcuffs (or in a witness chair), or with a critical investigation in shambles. 
 

• In a Thursday letter, Bannon’s lawyer informed January 6 investigators that he would not comply with their subpoena because Donald Trump, a disgraced private citizen, had “invoked” “executive privilege” and directed his former top aides not to testify or turn over documents. “We will comply with the directions of the courts, when and if they rule on these claims of both executive and attorney client privileges,” Bannon’s lawyer wrote.
   
• There are a couple of tiny details that make this letter pure nonsense. First, former presidents don’t get to invoke executive privilege to cover their own criminal asses; only President Biden can decide to shield White House records or communications. Second, Bannon left the Trump administration in 2017, and didn’t work for the executive branch in any capacity during the leadup to January 6. Even if we pretended for a moment that Trump had executive privilege, it would not extend to the self-employed podcast hosts in his contacts.
   
• Accordingly, committee chair Bennie Thompson and vice-chair Liz Cheney released a statement calling bullshit, threatening charges, and noting that two other witnesses were ignoring Trump’s orders not to cooperate: “While Mr. Meadows and Mr. Patel are, so far, engaging with the Select Committee, Mr. Bannon has indicated that he will try to hide behind vague references to privileges of the former president. The select committee fully expects all of these witnesses to comply with our demands for both documents and deposition testimony...We will not allow any witness to defy a lawful subpoena or attempt to run out the clock, and we will swiftly consider advancing a criminal contempt of Congress referral."

As for Biden invoking executive privilege to shield records from investigators, Trump is thus far out of luck.
 

• The White House has informed the National Archives that it won’t assert privilege over a first batch of documents from the Trump White House that the committee has requested. Trump can (and almost certainly will) file a lawsuit against the archives to try to block their release, but the courts have a tendency to rule that executive privilege is a) qualified (and not applicable to stuff like meetings about doing a coup) and b) up to the sitting president. Biden’s decision not to withhold this first batch of records doesn’t necessarily mean he won’t assert privilege later; White House officials have stressed that he’ll make those decisions on a case-by-case basis.
   
• Trump and Bannon may not have a legal leg to stand on, but they’re hoping they can stall long enough for Republicans to take control of the House and shut down the investigation. Trump hopes a right-wing judge will do his dirty work and block production of documents from the executive branch to the committee. If Bannon and/or the other three subpoenaed former aides fail to show up for their depositions next week, the panel could quickly vote on a contempt resolution and send it to the House floor for a vote. Once passed, it would be up to the Justice Department to act quickly on the referral, which it...might? The House could also exercise its inherent contempt authority and have the sergeant-at-arms detain Bannon until he agrees to cooperate, but that process hasn’t been used since 1934.

Every other Trump-friendly witness called to testify in the January 6 investigation will be watching to see whether the committee takes swift action to enforce Bannon’s subpoena, or signals that participation is functionally voluntary. Committee members have promised they’re ready to use every tool at their disposal; next week, they may need to prove it.

Phillip Picardi’s podcast Unholier Than Thou is back! This season is all about the wisdom of everyday people falling down, getting up, and trying new things as they navigate re-entry into a newish world. Listen as Phillip’s search for illumination takes him on a road trip from LA to Cambridge, Massachusetts for his first semester of Harvard Divinity School. Episode one of Unholier Than Thou with Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Executive Editor at Teen Vogue, is out now. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

The U.S. economy added just 194,000 jobs in September, according to a Labor Department report released on Friday, marking another disappointing month as the Delta surge continued to give the economic recovery a swirlie. That said, there’s some good news tucked under the unimpressive topline number: Average hourly wages climbed by 0.6 percent. Unemployment fell to 4.8 percent from 5.2 percent in August, the first time it’s dropped below five percent since the pandemic began. Black unemployment fell even more sharply, from 8.8 percent to 7.9 percent—though that drop could be partially attributable to more Black Americans being forced to leave the workforce altogether. The most hopeful piece of context is that coronavirus cases are finally declining across the country, and barring the emergence of an even nastier variant, there’s reason to be optimistic that we won’t face a devastating winter surge.

• Donald Trump concealed that his Washington, DC, hotel was losing millions of dollars, while also concealing that it was raking in millions of dollars from foreign governments, according to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
   
• Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said he won’t support a filibuster carveout to raise the debt ceiling in December, other Senate Democrats say they won’t do it via reconciliation, and Republicans say they won’t do anything, so we look forward to just sort of copy-pasting some old What A Day editions in a few weeks.
   
• Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who said last month that she was “looking forward to” passing policies to address climate change, reportedly wants to cut at least $100 billion from climate programs in the Build Back Better Act.
   
• Republican Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters earned about $1 million from his billionaire puppetmaster Peter Thiel last year, in a sobering reminder that no amount of money can buy charisma. 
   
• Democrats need to focus on engaging with minority voters in Sun Belt states to hold onto their majorities in 2022, according to a new study from the group Way to Win.
   
• Meet some of the Floridians who have been disenfranchised by Florida Republicans’ reinstatement of a poll tax (of a secret, unknowable amount!) for people with outstanding fines from prior felony convictions.
   
• The party of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who battled against the U.S. occupation of Iraq, looks set to decide the country’s next prime minister in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. 
   
• The FBI and San Francisco police say the Zodiac Killer case is still unsolved, notwithstanding the team of retired cops who say they’ve cracked this thing wide open.
   
• Andrew Lloyd Webber was so upset about how much CATS sucked that he bought a dog. May it look nothing at all like Judi Dench.

More than 130 countries have agreed to back the Biden administration’s proposed 15 percent global minimum tax rate, which will make it harder for big companies to avoid paying taxes by moving their headquarters overseas. The new minimum will generate around $150 billion in additional global tax revenue every year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Friday’s agreement also creates new rules for tech giants like Facebook and Amazon, which will now be required to pay taxes wherever they sell their goods and services, even if they don’t have a physical presence in those countries. Congress still needs to actually implement the tax agreement (guess what, Republicans don’t wanna), as do each of the other countries involved, but the announcement of a deal is a major step forward.

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President Biden has signed three executive orders restoring full protections to Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monuments.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has issued a new rule that will prevent evictions from public housing by giving tenants more time to access rental assistance. 

The New York Public Library system has eliminated late fees, effective immediately.

The inventor of Narcan used it to save a man’s life in Los Angeles.