We begin today with Hugo Lowell of the Guardian preview of the third hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

The panel will first examine the genesis of Trump’s pressure campaign on Pence to adopt an unconstitutional and unlawful plan to reject certified electors from certain states at the congressional certification in an attempt to give Trump a second presidential term.

The select committee then intends to show how that theory – advanced by external Trump legal adviser John Eastman – was rejected by Pence, his lawyers and the White House counsel’s office, who universally told the former president that the entire scheme was unlawful.

The select committee then intends to show how that theory – advanced by external Trump legal adviser John Eastman – was rejected by Pence, his lawyers and the White House counsel’s office, who universally told the former president that the entire scheme was unlawful.[...}

The select committee will additionally show that Trump’s false public remarks about Pence having the power to refuse to count votes for Biden – Pence had no such power – directly put the vice-president’s life in danger as the mob chanted “hang Mike Pence”.

Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey, and Emma Brown of The Washington Post report exclusively that Ginni Thomas also maintained email contact with Trump lawyer John Eastman.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has obtained email correspondence between Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and lawyer John Eastman, who played a key role in efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, according to three people involved in the committee’s investigation.

The emails show that Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known, two of the people said. The three declined to provide details and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The committee’s members and staffers are now discussing whether to spend time during their public hearings exploring Ginni Thomas’s role in the attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, the three people said. The Washington Post previously reported that the committee had not sought an interview with Thomas and was leaning against pursuing her cooperation with its investigation.

Now does Liz Cheney want to investigate that?

Justin Hendrix of JustSecurity tells us about a massive database of tweets about misinformation, disinformation, and rumors” that were spread on Twitter about the 2020 election.

On the same day the Committee laid out evidence that Trump and his associates knew the election was lost even as they cynically pushed the Big Lie, a group of researchers from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the Krebs Stamos Group* published a massive dataset of “misinformation, disinformation, and rumors spreading on Twitter about the 2020 U.S. election.” The dataset chronicles the role of key political elites, influencers and supporters of the President in advancing the Big Lie, exploring how key narratives spread on Twitter.

Published in the Journal of Quantitative Description, the paper accompanying the dataset is titled Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization: A Comprehensive Dataset of Misinformation Tweets from the 2020 U.S. Election. The dataset, which the researchers named ElectionMisinfo2020, “is made up of over 49 million tweets connected to 456 distinct misinformation stories spread about the 2020 U.S. election between September 1, 2020 and December 15, 2020,” and it “focuses on false, misleading, exaggerated, or unsubstantiated claims or narratives related to voting, vote counting, and other election procedures.”

“President Trump and other pro-Trump elites in media and politics set an expectation of voter fraud and then eagerly amplified any and every claim about election issues, often with voter fraud framing,” said one of the lead researchers, Dr. Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington and co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public. “But everyday people produced many of those claims.” The new report sheds light on how these claims proliferated from the margins to the nation’s Capitol.

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post writes about all the former president’s men and women.

As a candidate and as president, Trump liked to make his hires based on whether folks looked the part; he liked his statesmen and generals and personal representatives to exude “central casting” charisma and looks that are easy on the eye. And now these stars were stuck in videos with as much sheen as community access cable.

In his deposition, former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller is answering questions in muffled tones from behind a face mask while sitting in a stark, characterless room. The man once charged with speaking for the voluble Trump requires subtitles to make his words discernible. Ivanka Trump is positioned against an empty marble-patterned wall in hues of gray, from the color of lint to the color of saliva. Her heavy makeup only emphasizes that no amount of artifice can improve upon the dismal facts.

The elite circle of people who catered to a man who prided himself on his cinematic acumen has lost the power of its props, its costuming and its messaging. For an administration that loved nothing more than to surround itself with American flags by the dozens, there were few flags waving in the background as the pack of former colleagues, advisers and enablers sat through questioning by just-the-facts government lawyers. Instead of being wrapped in the accoutrements of patriotism, they were surrounded by all the trappings of grifters, cheats and con-men stuck in an interrogation room. The crafty pugilists were on the defensive.

Heather Digby Parton of Salon writes about the so-called guardrails of democracy that really weren’t guardrails at all.

The January 6 committee is now looking closely at what happened after that in the period between the election and the Capitol riot. What they have found is that the remaining protectors of the guardrails didn't do much to stop Trump from attempting to overturn the election.

Their reticence to do something other than watch from the sidelines led to Trump empowering Rudy Giuliani and the rogues gallery of misfits and weirdos who helped him spread the Big Lie that led to the insurrection. Some of the anonymous heroes even suggested in the press that Trump just needed to cry it out and then he would bow out gracefully. The Jan 6 committee hearing this week revealed that within the White House during this period they called themselves "Team Normal" apparently because they knew the Big Lie was a big lie and they didn't go out of their way to help Trump spread it. However, some helped Trump lay the groundwork for his claims that the election was being rigged and only balked after the fact when he insisted that it was. Some of them helped him raise hundreds of millions of dollars in a clear-cut scam while others are even currently working for people who are running for office on the Big Lie platform. They all stayed mum about what Trump and his crazy accomplices were up to. It's good they are telling the truth under oath to the committee but it doesn't speak well of them that they didn't step up when it really counted. Their silence led to death and mayhem and an ongoing crisis in our democracy.

The Washington Post reported some new details about the one group in "Team Normal" who did manage to hold Trump back from doing his worst in those final days: the lawyers in the Department of Justice(DOJ) and the White House Counsel's office. While Jared Kushner testified that he dismissed them as a bunch of whiners, it was their threats to quit that kept Trump from firing the Acting Attorney General and replacing him with an obscure toadie named Jeffrey Clark who was somehow persuaded that he could take over the DOJ and use it to help Trump overturn the election.

It occurs to me that Fiona Hill described a similar “two-track” way of working as it pertained to Ukraine during the first impeachment trial although, in that case, the foreign service and national security civil servants weren’t content to “watch from the sidelines.” 

Frida Ghitis of CNN writes about the Trump campaign’s election grift.

The Trump campaign’s alleged grift was well underway long before Election Day. He showed no compunction about tricking his supporters. In one of the most shameless scams, the Trump campaign extracted tens of millions of dollars by setting up the donations page on the campaign website that by default turned every donation into a recurring payment, according to reporting last year by the New York Times.

The scam snagged huge amounts of money. Among those who got caught up in it were Trump supporters – including a cancer patient – who saw their bank accounts drained. Complaints about the scheme overwhelmed fraud lines at credit card companies, according to the Times report. Despite issuing more than $122 million in refunds, campaign spokesman Jason Miller downplayed the controversy, arguing campaign records showed only a small percentage of complaints.

Not content with that shakedown, the campaign added another default setting, a so-called “money bomb” that doubled the donation of Trump supporters they took for suckers.[‘’’]

Trump’s campaign transgressions are in keeping with Trump’s own decades’ long track record of pushing the envelope on financial matters, no matter the consequences for others.

However, EJ Montini of the Arizona Republic says that the grifted, “cultists” that they are, don’t care.

Instead of election challenges, the select committee pointed out that the money solicited by Trump went to “a conservative organization employing former Trump staffers, to the Trump Hotel Collection, to the company that organized the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol last Jan. 6” and others.

Amanda Wick, a lawyer for the Jan. 6 committee, said, “The evidence developed by the select committee highlights how the Trump campaign aggressively pushed false election claims to fundraise, telling supporters it would be used to fight voter fraud that did not exist. The emails continued through Jan. 6, even as Trump spoke on the Ellipse. Thirty minutes after the last fundraising email was sent, the Capitol was breached.”

The cultists do not care.

They refuse to believe.

They refuse even to hear the evidence, perhaps out of fear that they might believe, and they do not want to risk that. It’s a mindset that is difficult to imagine.

Charles Blow of The New York Times wonders if the U.S. will survive this period of mass hysteria.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker talks about The Federal Reserve’s biggest interest rate hike in 28 years and wonders will it stem the tide of inflation.

In addition to raising the rate, Powell indicated that another three-quarter-point hike is possible at the Fed’s next meeting, in July. The members of its policymaking committee also raised their predictions for where the federal funds rate will be at the end of this year and next year—to 3.4 per cent and 3.8 per cent, respectively. “We anticipate that ongoing rate increases will be appropriate,” Powell said. [...]

When inflation began to rise last year, Powell resisted calls from some quarters—yes, that’s you, Larry Summers—for the Fed to hit the monetary brakes, describing the rise in prices as “transitory.” He dropped this term late last year, in time for the economy to be hit by the Omicron variant, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a fresh lockdown in China—each of which carried a further inflationary shock. In retrospect, the Fed made an error by not starting to raise rates sooner, although, given that inflation is a global problem—it’s running ​​at 8.1 per cent in the eurozone and 7.8 per cent in the United Kingdom—it’s not clear how much of a difference a quicker policy reversal in the U.S. would have made.

In any case, the big question now is whether the Fed can raise rates at a more rapid pace than it previously anticipated, and bring inflation down, without knocking the economy into an outright recession. According to a new survey conducted by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago, which was published on Sunday, more than two-thirds of academic economists think that Powell won’t pull it off: they are predicting that a recession will start next year.

Damian Carrington of the Guardian writes about the enormous rise in temperatures in an area of the Arctic.

The heating is occurring in the North Barents Sea, a region where fast rising temperatures are suspected to trigger increases in extreme weather in North America, Europe and Asia. The researchers said the heating in this region was an “early warning” of what could happen across the rest of the Arctic.

The new figures show annual average temperatures in the area are rising across the year by up to 2.7C a decade, with particularly high rises in the months of autumn of up to 4C a decade. This makes the North Barents Sea and its islands the fastest warming place known on Earth.

Recent years have seen temperatures far above average recorded in the Arctic, with seasoned observers describing the situation as “crazy”, “weird”, and “simply shocking”. Some climate scientists have warned the unprecedented events could signal faster and more abrupt climate breakdown.

It was already known that the climate crisis was driving heating across the Arctic three times faster than the global average, but the new research shows the situation is even more extreme in places.

Steven Erlanger of The New York Times writes about the additional arms that the U.S. and its allies are sending to Ukraine.

The package, detailed by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III after a meeting with allies at NATO headquarters in Brussels, includes more long-range artillery, anti-ship missile launchers and more rounds for howitzers and for a sophisticated American rocket system on which Ukrainians are currently being trained. Overall, the United States has now committed about $5.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

Mr. Biden said in a statement that he had told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine about the new weapons during a 40-minute call Wednesday morning. Mr. Zelensky and his aides have recently ramped up public pressure on the West to supply vastly more of the sophisticated armaments it has already sent, questioning their allies’ commitment to the Ukrainian cause and insisting that nothing else can stop the inexorable, brutal Russian advance in eastern Ukraine.

Western officials and arms experts caution that flooding the battlefield with advanced weapons is far slower and more difficult than it sounds, facing obstacles in manufacturing, delivery, training and compatibility — and in avoiding depletion of Western arsenals.

David M. Herszenhorn, Barbara Moens, Hans von der Burchard, Jacob Hanke Vela, and Maia de La Baume of POLITICO Europe report on the lack of unanimity by European Union members to approve Ukraine’s request for membership.

The European Commission on Friday is expected to recommend formal candidate status for Ukraine and for neighboring Moldova, but the final decision requires unanimity among the 27 EU heads of state and government who will gather for a European Council summit in Brussels next week but still don’t agree on what to do.

Rejecting Ukraine’s request — or even a fudge nodding to future “membership perspective” — would be a devastating blow for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, potentially demoralizing many of his more than 40 million citizens, and especially his military, which continues to take heavy causalities as it fights off Russian invaders who are now occupying large swathes of the south and east of the country.

Such a rejection would also further inflame Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fantasies about reclaiming a sphere of influence resembling that of the Soviet Union and its superpower status during the Cold War. Supporters of Ukraine’s membership bid say that anything less than candidate status would encourage Putin to prolong the war.

On the fifth anniversary of the tragedy at the Grenfell Tower in London, Stephen Rand of The Article writes that Grenfell and the UK’s Rwanda “extradition” policy are indicators of a Conservative Party gone wrong.

The Grenfell Tower calamity was so tragic and sobering because, when we saw the faces of the deceased, we saw people who were, in effect, in the care of the state. The people who burned alive or suffocated in that tower block were the vulnerable and voiceless, the very people whom Michael Gove had said the Conservatives needed to support. Those were the people whom the state has let down for decades. To say that the Conservative government of five years ago alone had blood on its hands is to misjudge the scale of the issue. The victims of Grenfell were let down by the whole apparatus of the state for years — by Left and Right alike.

There is an inquiry into the disaster which will report later this year, and it must be allowed to run its course before anyone jumps to conclusions. At the same time, it is wrong to use the inquiry to dodge questions and let the indignation so many felt five years ago splutter into disinterest. It’s already clear that the residents of Grenfell had foreseen and warned of the tragedy before it took place, but were ignored by a system which should have been designed to help them. It ’ s also clear that the inquiry will paint a picture of victims, not only killed in their homes, but neglected through numerous iterations and layers of the state. However, it is a stain on the memory of all those who died that nothing of any real worth has been done to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.[...]

If Grenfell happened because of disinterest and inaction, the Rwanda deportation policy represents the exploitation of the vulnerable and voiceless for political gain. Thanks to ranting from the likes of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Liz Truss need to be seen to be doing something — anything — about people coming over the Channel on dinghies. They seem to think the answer is to be found in the crime and punishment policies of the 18th century. In 1788 the starving were punished for poaching by being transported to Australia. In 2022 asylum seekers are flown to a 21st century penal colony in Rwanda. It’s sickening.

Finally today, José Gomes Temporão, public health minister under former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva writes for AlJazeera that the U.S. should be prioritizing equitable access to COVID vaccines for Latin America.

Comprised of mostly middle-income countries, Latin America’s governments have found themselves truly caught in the middle. They do not have resources comparable to those mobilised by wealthy countries in response to the pandemic. But neither can they benefit from international support programmes often targeted only at low and lower-middle-income countries.

As pharmaceutical companies have prioritised selling doses where they can secure the highest profits and without a shared approach to advance the interests of the region as a whole, accessing COVID-19 vaccines has been an uphill struggle for the continent. As a result, more than 200 million people remain unvaccinated across the region.

A combination of large urban populations, heavy chronic disease burden, weak health systems, and a seriously unequal global vaccine rollout has led some experts to warn that Latin America could be the most vulnerable region in the world to the emergence of a new variant. This is not just a Latin American problem, but a problem for everyone.

Everyone have a good day!