-Joe Cunningham, former congressman and current bird victim
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Donald Trump’s attempts to shield coup evidence from House investigators have been rejected nearly as many times as he formally lost the 2020 election, which is to say, we’ve lost count but it’s getting embarrassing.
- President Biden has ordered the National Archives to release Trump White House visitor logs to the January 6 committee, once again consigning Trump’s bogus executive-privilege claim to the (conspicuously unclogged) toilet. Those records include appointment information for anyone who was allowed into the White House complex on January 6. In her letter to the Archives rejecting Trump’s claim, White House counsel Dana Remus noted that the Biden administration makes its visitor logs public voluntarily, as did the Obama administration.
- Remus wrote that “in light of the urgency” of the committee’s investigation, the Archives should turn over the records within 15 days, “unless prohibited by court order.” Trump is likely, if not compulsively driven, to try to run out the clock by challenging Biden’s latest decision in court, but that strategy didn’t end well for him the last time his executive privilege case made it to the Supreme Court.
- The courts don’t seem impressed with Trump-allies’ arguments for slow-walking their subpoena compliance, either. A federal judge ordered an expedited review of Coup Memo Author John Eastman’s effort to block the release of 11,000 pages of emails that he claims are protected by attorney-client privilege, and put the burden on Eastman to prove that he actually had a formal legal relationship with Trump or the White House.
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Meanwhile, the January 6 committee has expanded its inquiry into a scheme to use fake slates of electors to keep Trump in office.
- The panel subpoenaed six more people connected to that plan on Tuesday, including two members of the Trump campaign, Director of Election Day Operations Michael Roman, and his deputy, Gary Brown. Chairman Bennie Thompson said in a statement that according to communications investigators had obtained, the two of them were involved in “a coordinated strategy to contact Republican members of state legislatures” in swing states that Trump had lost, to urge them to send phony electors to Congress.
- The subpoena list also includes Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward and former Michigan GOP chair Laura Cox, as well as two prominent GOP candidates in battleground states: Arizona lawmaker Mark Finchem is running for secretary of state, with Trump’s endorsement, and Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano is running for governor. The panel has asked each of them to provide testimony by mid-March.
As transparently pathetic as they may be, Trump’s and other witnesses’ stalling tactics could still succeed in burying critical information if Republicans win back the House and disband the committee. The courts and the Justice Department can refuse to play along; the rest of us can get busy keeping the House.
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Lovett or Leave It live shows are returning to Dynasty Typewriter in Koreatown next month! Starting March 10th you can join Jon Lovett and a lineup of really funny people to the stage every week. For more information on Crooked’s upcoming live events, head to CROOKED.COM/EVENTS.
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Eight Republican senators have come out against the creation of a federal “no-fly list” for unruly passengers, staking out a bold pro-beating-up-flight-attendants position for the GOP. In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday, the Republicans perceptively noted that a national list to bar violent maniacs from boarding future flights would mostly affect people who’ve refused to comply with mask mandates, and argued that it would equate them with “terrorists.” Seems like a reasonable-enough comparison for folks like the Delta Air Lines passenger who tried to open an emergency door in-flight on Friday, in the hopes that terrified passengers would start filming his antivax monologue. (Soothing fun fact: Opening a plane door mid-flight is physically impossible.) That’s who Republicans are defending as soldiers in their pro-COVID culture war, and voters outside their radicalized base might like to hear about it.
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- The U.S. and NATO said they’ve seen no signs of a Russian troop pullback, as Russia claimed to withdraw more forces from the Ukrainian border on Wednesday. Ukrainian officials said that a wave of cyberattacks that began on Tuesday was the largest in the country’s history.
- Sea levels on U.S. coastlines are projected to rise another foot by 2050, according to a new NOAA report. That’s as much sea level rise as the U.S. saw over the whole last century, and it’s expected to dramatically increase coastal flooding.
- The U.S. has recorded more than one million “excess deaths” since the pandemic began. The vast majority were due to COVID, but heart disease, hypertension, dementia, and other illnesses also caused more fatalities than expected.
- School-board members across the country have been flooded with death threats over COVID rules, education around race, and bathroom policies that don’t persecute trans kids.
- This might not help: A San Francisco recall effort successfully ousted three school board members over pandemic school closures and some clumsy racial-justice initiatives.
- CNN executive Allison Gollust resigned on Tuesday after an investigation found that she had violated company policies, “including CNN's News Standards and Practices.”
- Saudi Arabia seems to have rejected President Biden’s request to ramp up oil production, evidently to hurt Democrats in the midterms with high gas prices.
- Corn-based ethanol is likely actually much worse for the climate than straight gasoline, according to a new study, due to the emissions involved in transforming the landscape to grow dizzying amounts of corn.
- Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries and two other House Democrats have launched an effort to protect incumbents from progressive primary challengers in safe blue districts, a neat priority for the party in an uphill fight to keep the House.
- Here's the sobering tale of blind people who regained vision with high-tech retinal implants, only for the company to abandon the technology, leaving their eyeballs obsolete.
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Today in Oh Man, Right, THAT Guy, former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke repeatedly broke federal ethics rules while serving in the Trump administration, according to an investigation by the department’s inspector general. A report released Wednesday said that Zinke improperly continued to work on a commercial development project in his Montana hometown while in office, lied to an Interior Department ethics official who confronted him about it, and misused his position by ordering department staff to help him with the project. The inspector general referred the matter to the Justice Department, which last summer (drumroll) declined to pursue criminal charges. (Thanks, Merrick Garland!) Anywho, after misusing his Cabinet position for personal profit and facing zero consequences, this confirmed crook is now running for Congress in Montana with Donald Trump’s endorsement.
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New Zealand has become the latest country to ban conversion therapy.
The New Mexico House has unanimously passed a bill that would increase the salaries of indigenous-language teachers.
The Vermont House has approved a bill that would make it easier for Vermonters to amend their birth certificates to match their gender identity.
California will install a first-of-its-kind network of solar panels over water canals, which, if expanded statewide, could both create renewable energy and save billions of gallons of water from evaporation.
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