On Tuesday morning, Barely House Speaker Kevin McCarthy shambled in front of the cameras to publicly extract the last crumbling vertebrae from his spinal region. McCarthy announced an evidence-free start to impeaching President Joe Biden by moving to begin an “impeachment inquiry”—without the trouble of actually holding a House vote.
The whole announcement was patently ridiculous, and is gathering exactly the level of ridicule and disdain it deserves.
In effect, McCarthy’s announcement does absolutely nothing. It takes the pointless investigations already being conducted by three House committees and simply gives them a new name, though it doesn’t give them a mote of authority or a scintilla of validity. The only thing that McCarthy’s statement really does is confirm, again, that the Republican leader of the House will readily fold to the slightest pressure from the most radical elements of his party—no matter the cost.
Less than two weeks ago, McCarthy went on Breitbart to tell them he would not start an impeachment inquiry without a vote. “To open an impeachment inquiry is a serious matter,” McCarthy said in the ancient times of Friday before last, “and House Republicans would not take it lightly or use it for political purposes. The American people deserve to be heard on this matter through their elected representatives. That’s why, if we move forward with an impeachment inquiry, it would occur through a vote on the floor of the People’s House and not through a declaration by one person.”
In the past, McCarthy was even more insistent that a full House vote before initiating impeachment wasn’t just something that was owed to the American people, but was required by law. He said as much in 2019 while attacking Rep. Nancy Pelosi. “Speaker Pelosi can't decide on impeachment unilaterally. It requires a full vote of the House of Representatives,” McCarthy said.
But McCarthy dropped this requirement like a hot potato on Tuesday because … someone looked at him mean. That someone was Rep. Matt Gaetz, who threatened to go out there and say bad things about McCarthy.
Understand that Gaetz didn’t say he was going to push for McCarthy’s removal from his big office; he simply threatened to go out there and make a speech in which he outlined things he thought McCarthy was doing wrong. This was a threat delivered by a guy who, according to Rep. Eric Swalwell, makes “more empty threats—day in/day out” than anyone he’s ever worked with.
But Gaetz looking at McCarthy cross-eyed was enough to trigger a complete collapse, showing again that McCarthy will fold to the slightest bit of pressure. Puppets everywhere look at McCarthy with pity. At least they wait until someone actually pulls their strings.
Confronted by the abundant evidence of former President Donald Trump’s widespread criminality, Republicans have demonstrated consistent outrage … at law enforcement. When they’re not trying to defund the FBI or get rid of the Department of Justice, they’re going after more specific targets.
That has included (but is far from limited to): Rep. Jim Jordan subpoenaing a former member of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office to appear before the House Judiciary Committee for a browbeating, repeated efforts to defund special counsel Jack Smith, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy suggesting a no-evidence-required impeachment of Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Trump supporter threatening to kill federal Judge Tanya Chutkan, and Georgia Republicans trying to defund Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Rep. Andy Biggs even tried to defund the Manhattan DA’s office, which is made only slightly more ridiculous by the fact that Congress provides only a fraction of funds for local prosecutors in the first place.
Really, Republicans have vividly demonstrated that no law, no judge, and no agency means anything to them when it comes to protecting Trump. But when Republicans in both Washington, D.C., and Georgia began planning a means to impeach Willis, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp did something completely unexpected—he defended the Fulton County prosecutor and denounced his fellow Republicans.
As PBS reports, Kemp pulled no punches in saying that efforts to oust Willis for having the gall to indict Trump are just “political theater that only inflames the emotions of the moment.”
Kemp is no liberal. When he ran for governor in 2018, he had Trump’s ”full and total endorsement,” and Trump praised Kemp for his anti-immigrant, pro-gun positions. But Kemp earned Trump’s ire after the 2020 election when Kemp refused to intervene to prevent certification of Georgia’s election results, despite a call from Trump. Trump went on to attack Kemp on social media, which didn’t stop the governor from easily winning the 2022 Republican primary and being reelected. In the latest elections in the state, candidates endorsed by Kemp easily outperformed those endorsed by Trump.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that much of the Georgia GOP isn’t in Trump’s pocket. Because it is.
As The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, the state party has broken into factions, but Trump still enjoys great support among party officials and state legislators, even as a new poll shows high levels of concern among the state’s Republican voters about Trump’s actions following the 2020 election. In short, Georgia may be the one state where Republican leadership is seriously struggling with the question of whether to free themselves from Trump … though even Kemp has inexplicably suggested he would still vote for Trump in 2024.
Kemp’s willingness to stand up to the members of his party who want to rip up the legal system to defend Trump stands in stark contrast to America’s most spineless man, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Kemp appears to recognize that going after district attorneys just because they are prosecuting someone you support is more than a little problematic. On the other hand, McCarthy is not just failing to stand up to nonsensical demands in the House, but also he’s adding his own.
When Republicans started to worry that a no-investigation impeachment of President Joe Biden might not come off as planned, McCarthy offered up an impeachment of Garland for … whatever.
“I don’t know of a chargeable crime,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told The Hill.
Neither does anyone else. Including McCarthy. The suggestion is just another in a long line of examples of how the barely-speaker is willing to toady to his party’s extremists to keep his fingernail-thin grip on his big office. As Vanity Fair notes, caving to threats from the same extremists who tried to keep him from being elected to begin with is what McCarthy is all about.
As MSNBC puts it, McCarthy might be expected to ignore “oddball bills” and calls to impeach members of the Biden administration. Instead, he has “expressed tacit support” for all these actions, no matter how off the rails. In MSNBC’s words, McCarthy is “taking orders from Mar-a-Lago” and “going along with absurd talking points about … ‘weaponization’ of agencies that haven’t actually been weaponized.”
Kemp is no hero. On many points, his positions are reprehensible. But at least he has enough self-respect to refuse to be the lapdog of extremists willing to sacrifice everything to save Trump. He shows the path that McCarthy might have taken if he actually wanted to lead the House, rather than just follow the worst actions of its worst members.
The far-right justices on Wisconsin's Supreme Court just can't handle the fact that liberals now have the majority for the first time in 15 years, so they're in the throes of an ongoing meltdown—and their tears are delicious. On this week's episode of "The Downballot," co-hosts David Nir and David Beard drink up all the schadenfreude they can handle as they puncture conservative claims that their progressive colleagues are "partisan hacks" (try looking in the mirror) or are breaking the law (try reading the state constitution). Elections do indeed have consequences!
Sen. Chuck Grassley released an FBI FD-1023 form related to the Hunter Biden investigation. These forms are not intended to be public documents and it is highly unusual to release them publicly. These are the forms that the FBI uses to “record raw, unverified reporting from confidential human sources.” They do not represent the results of investigations, and “recording this information does not validate it or establish its credibility.”
These forms are not classified, but they are kept in confidence for a number of reasons that are mostly connected with protecting sources. The FBI has made it clear to Grassley repeatedly that releasing the form would have a negative impact not just on this case, but on every case that depends on confidential human sources.
Grassley released it anyway because he has placed what he sees as a momentary opportunity to hurt President Joe Biden over the needs of the FBI and the good of the nation. More than that, Grassley is doing this to forward a story that he knows is a lie.
The form, which is dated June 2020, claims to be sourced from a businessman who was introduced to leadership at Burisma energy in Ukraine in “late 2015 or early 2016” to help the company find a U.S. company to purchase. During a meeting with Burisma leadership, the source claims that he was told Hunter Biden was put on the company board to "protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.” Asked why it isn’t Hunter doing the job of locating a U.S. form to purchase, he’s told that “Hunter is not that smart.” Finally the source is told by Burisma executive Mykola Zlochevsky that the company has to pay $5 million to Joe Biden and another $5 million to Hunter Biden because they are being investigated by Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, and Burisma needed Biden to “deal with Shokin.”
The story then jumps to a phone call in 2016. Or maybe it was 2017. As with the original meeting, the source can’t recall the year, though he recalls the dialogue word for word. This time Zlochevsky complains that Burisma was forced to pay Biden, using a term that the source describes as “Russian-criminal-slang,” and now that Trump has been elected their investment is worthless. However, Shokin has been fired, so there was no investigation and no one would ever know about the money they paid the Bidens.
Jump forward to 2019 when CHS again meets with Burisma executives and Zlochevsky brags to the source about how clever they were in hiding the payments to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, and how no one will ever find those payments. According to the source, this is the kind of thing Ukrainian businessmen like to brag about in casual conversation.
Finally, it comes down to this bit where one of the Burisma executives tells the source:
"... he has many text messages and 'recordings' that show he was coerced to make such payments … he had a total of "17 recordings" involving the Bidens; two of the recordings included Joe Biden, and the remaining 15 recordings only Included Hunter Biden. … These recordings evidence Zlochevskiy was somehow coerced into paying the Bidens to ensure Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired.”
If any of this sounds slightly familiar, it’s because it’s the exact story that Rudy Giuliani told to The New York Times in May 2019. In that story, Hunter Biden was placed on the board of Burisma in 2014 not because he was clearly a well-placed American with years of experience in lobbying, investment banking, and corporate governance who might be essential to an energy company looking to expand internationally, but because his father could get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired.
And Shokin was fired in 2016. The Ukrainian parliament voted him out after Joe Biden made it clear that the United States was very concerned about Shokin and might withhold or delay assistance to Ukraine unless he was removed. That’s a real thing. Biden even bragged about it later, telling a group of foreign policy advisers that he confronted the Ukrainian president and demanded Shokin’s firing.
Except the reason that Shokin was fired was because he was not investigating cases of corruption and was instead either turning a blind eye or an outstretched hand when dealing with Ukrainian oligarchs who were making off with billions. Both the U.S. and the U.K. governments had been pressuring Ukraine about Shokin for over a year before Joe Biden’s visit. In fact, the thing that upset the U.K. government most was that Shokin was refusing to investigate one firm in particular: Burisma.
As the head of a Ukrainian anti-corruption organization told Radio Free Europe, Shokin had dumped the investigation of Burisma when he took office.
"Ironically, Joe Biden asked Shokin to leave because the prosecutor failed [to pursue] the Burisma investigation, not because Shokin was tough and active with this case," Kaleniuk said.
When The New York Times ran Giuliani’s version of the story in 2019, it took Bloomberg News just one week to rip it apart.
… at the time Biden made his ultimatum, the probe into the company—Burisma Holdings, owned by Mykola Zlochevsky—had been long dormant, according to the former official, Vitaliy Kasko.
“There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky,” Kasko said in an interview last week. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.”
From the beginning of this whole affair, and in fact from the moment Giuliani set foot in Ukraine, it’s been obvious that in getting Shokin fired Joe Biden wasn’t protecting Burisma, he was taking action that put the company under renewed scrutiny. And in fact prosecutors did reopen their investigation of Burisma, reviewing multiple instances in which Zlochevsky was suspected of crimes.
All of this—all of it—was thoroughly covered just two years ago, including just how Giuliani generated his claims against Joe Biden and Hunter Biden in the first place.
Giuliani made a personal visit to an outgoing prosecutor, tried to convince him to play ball, and even called Trump directly while in the prosecutor’s office so that Trump could explain how excited he was about the “investigation” into Biden. The prosecutor even went so far as to add some new false claims, asserting that Joe Biden personally took a payment to act as an agent of a Ukrainian company.
That moment when Giuliani was making calls directly to the White House from the office of an outgoing official is the genesis of the idea that Joe Biden took some kind of payment from Burisma. Until that moment, it had come up nowhere. From no one.
Over the following months, Giuliani assembled a group of known criminals and former members of the pro-Russian government who had been ousted with the election of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He found several willing to play along with his growing story, but they had a price: They wanted Trump to get rid of U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was too effective in fighting corruption. Trump gave them exactly what they wanted to get his false evidence against Biden, but even in 2019 the holes in the story were so big that the whole scheme was obviously a … scheme.
Now it’s back again and nothing has changed. The document that the FBI held was clearly authored by someone who was part of Giuliani’s plot, and it was clearly Giuliani himself who pointed out this document to Grassley and others. The document contains exactly the same false, easily disproved claims as the story the Times printed up for Giuliani and was obviously written with the sole purpose of providing some faux documentary evidence for the story Giuliani and Trump were pushing at the time. It’s all part of what Trump was trying to get Zelenskyy to say when he made his impeachment-worthy phone call to the Ukrainian leader.
The content of the FD-1023 form is a lie. What’s more, Grassley knows it is a lie. He knows this has all been investigated and found to be baseless accusations. And he knows that releasing this document causes real, genuine harm.
Protecting this type of information from wider disclosure is crucial to our ability to recruit sources and ensure the safety of the source or others mentioned in the reporting. CHSs are critical to cases across all FBI programs—whether it’s violent crime, drug cartels, or terrorism. It would be difficult to effectively recruit these sources if we can’t assure them of their confidentiality. And without these sources, we would not be able to build the cases that are so important to keeping Americans safe.
Grassley was sent a letter reminding him of exactly this issue and asking him expressly to remind everyone involved to keep in mind the importance of keeping these documents secure. Instead, Grassley did the opposite: He published the FD-1023 in blatant defiance of the FBI’s request.
Why did he do it? He did it for the same reason that Republicans had been seeking release of the document all along, and that was because they knew it would generate headlines like this:
Bidens allegedly 'coerced' Burisma CEO to pay them millions to help get Ukraine prosecutor fired: FBI form
Bidens allegedly 'coerced' Burisma CEO to pay them millions to help get Ukraine prosecutor fired: FBI form
Grassley purposely released a document that he knew was a lie for the purpose of attacking Joe Biden even though he knew it would put Americans in danger and damage the FBI’s ability to investigate actual crimes of all sorts.
To gain a moment of political attention, Grassley is creating an immeasurable risk. How can witnesses come to the FBI to make a confidential statement knowing that their identities and claims can be revealed for political expediency by someone who has no real interest in the truth?
There is a genuine broad streak of corruption in this case, and it runs right through Iowa.
On Jan. 23, 2020, the same day that Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial began, Daily Kos diverted from following that story to cover what was then referred to as the “Wuhan virus,” after the city in China where the first outbreak of the highly infectious disease was reported. At the time of that report, there had been 17 deaths connected to the virus, but with 21 million people under lockdown in China and scientists already working to sequence the virus, that report ended with reassurance that “Restricting the spread of an emerging disease remains a near-impossible task, but health officials around the world are giving it a really extraordinary try.”
That report was the first of more than 500 that would follow. Daily Kos’ coverage included Trump’s promotion of increasingly unlikely outlandish “cures” and Dr. Anthony Fauci becoming a hero to Americans as well as a villain to conspiracy theorists. Seemingly overnight this became a world in which everyone was all too familiar with overflowing hospitals, cheering weary healthcare workers at the end of their shift, and terms like “spike protein” or “variant.”
Since then, there have been another 6,899,724 deaths. Of those, 1,134,710 happened in the United States. At its worst, the level of excess mortalities in the United States rose to an astounding 46%, including not just deaths directly attributed to COVID-19, but those who died because they couldn’t get adequate treatment in a pandemic-driven world.
However, over the first half of this year, the level of excess deaths has hit another very important number. That number is 0%. As far as deaths are concerned, the pandemic may be over.
Right now, a quick look at the CDC data shows that Puerto Rico still attributes 4.5% of deaths to infection by COVID-19. No other state or territory currently has a value above 1.5% and several states are reporting numbers so low that they easily round to 0%.
However, the CDC values also show that many states have quit breaking out COVID-19 deaths into a separate category. That’s a trend that started two years ago, when some Republican governors found it highly inconvenient to admit that people were dying from COVID-19 in their states. But even for those states where COVID deaths are shuffled in among deaths due to “respiratory failure” or “cardiac arrest,” the damage being caused by COVID-19 should show up in the form of excess deaths.
But in the first half of 2023, that signal disappeared.
The chart of excess deaths in the U.S. clearly shows the spike of initial deaths largely centered in the Northeast, where many medical facilities were overrun and life-saving equipment like ventilators became a huge topic of concern. Additional spikes appear as the disease spreads across the country, peaking at the end of 2020 when most states had lowered any restrictions and people traveled to see their families around the holidays. There’s a sharp drop in the rate of deaths in spring of 2021, as vaccines begin a widespread rollout. However, more spikes come in the fall of 2021 with the arrival of the 200% more infectious delta variant, and at the end of the year with still more travel and more family get-togethers. Then rates drop off again before the arrival of the still more infectious omicron variant, which drives a prolonged period of elevated deaths that peaks … with family travel and get-togethers at the end of the year.
Then the rates drop again at the beginning of 2023. And they have stayed down.
However, there’s another way of looking at this, with just a little annotation, that adds a cautionary note to the current celebration.
Looked at this way, it’s easy to see that every year of the pandemic has ended in much the same way, with that travel-related spike in which millions of Americans ran around the country stirring the mix and making sure that the latest variant was spread far and wide. When that spike subsides, each year has seen a big decline in excess deaths. There are two reasons for this. One is probably that following the spike more people have a level of exposure to the latest variant and have gained at least partial immunity. The other factor is that many of the most susceptible died during that holiday spike.
In each of the previous years, that low level of post-holiday deaths continued for some time, but only until a new variant that was either more contagious or more evasive of past infection became dominant. Then the number of deaths rose again.
It’s easy to read into those declining humps the idea that each variant has become weaker than the one before. That’s not the case. Untreated delta in a person with no immunity is actually 3.45 times more likely to be deadly than early variants up to alpha, and untreated omicron is about the same. Contrary to popular belief, there is no evolutionary pressure on viruses to become less deadly. In fact, since the same factors that make a disease more infectious can also make it more likely to result in the death of the host, diseases can easily move from mild to more deadly over time.
What’s different about 2023 so far is that no new variant has appeared that is significantly more contagious, or more evasive, than omicron. Also, the CDC estimates that 96% of Americans have antibodies to at least one variant of COVID-19 through either vaccination or exposure. Put that all together, and you get a season where COVID deaths have just stayed down.
The other big factor is treatment. In 2020, medical workers were in the dark on how to handle a COVID-19 infection. Now, in addition to over 75% of the population being vaccinated at least once, the steps to more effectively treat COVID-19 are better understood. Plus there are new tools like Paxlovid, which can reduce the rate of death even if it doesn’t necessarily help people get over symptoms more quickly. Improved treatment over time is a big factor in why each of those peaks in mortality tends to be smaller than the previous.
That’s fantastic. But it’s also not a guarantee of peachy keen sailing from here on out.
Scientists around the world are still tracking variants of concern, two of which are thought to be more contagious than baseline omicron while maintaining about the same level of severity. Those variants, or others with similar statistics, could become dominant in the United States in coming weeks, creating a new crest in mortality. All of these variants are descended from omicron. Right now, alpha, delta, and all the other variants and subvariants are either essentially extinct or found only at very low levels in the population. Omicron has won the evolution game by simply being more infectious than all the rest—including by being the variant most likely to infect people who have already been infected by past variants.
The good news is that the relative level of change in infectiousness between these latest variants is much lower than the two-times, or even five-times jumps seen earlier. The SARS-CoV-2 virus underwent a period in which the billions of people infected, pouring out quadrillions of new viruses, created a high-speed evolutionary showdown for most infectious virus ever. But having obtained a measles-like rate of contagiousness, the structure of the virus may not offer any other opportunities for big jumps that don’t involve a whole series of changes to the genetic sequence.
So the next big wave may never come—or it may begin next week. But even if the threat still looms out there, the level of deaths at this moment deserves real celebration.
Yes, things could get worse again quickly. Yes, levels of hospitalization haven’t dropped nearly as sharply as deaths, so COVID-19 is still making thousands of people a day very, very sick. Yes, long COVID remains a poorly understood problem that is affecting the lives of millions and will affect both the economy and the stability of health care programs. Yes, COVID-19 probably has more nasty sequelae waiting in the wings that we don’t understand at the moment.
But right now, the number of people dying from COVID-19 in the United States has dropped to a level that is pretty much lost in statistical noise. Numbers that were once going up by thousands a day are now going up by single digits. This is all much better than I expected.
That’s worth celebrating. Just please don’t blow the candles out while they’re on the cake. Because … germs.
Last week, Republicans in the House were desperately seeking a reason to impeach President Joe Biden. That lead to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Bobert exchanging insults on the House floor, competing bills that included claims that Biden was responsible for an international child trafficking ring, and Republican leadership even more desperately trying to find a way to avoid defending, again, the painful foolishness and delusional nonsense spewed by the member of its most powerful caucus.
Bobert and Greene’s struggle to one-up each other on the outlandishness of their call for a Biden impeachment came just a week after Rep. Bob Goode called for an impeachment of FBI Director Christopher Wray, which came a week after Republicans tried, and failed, to hold Wray in contempt of Congress, and a full month after Greene’s earlier attempt to impeach Wray, who was appointed by Donald Trump, for turning the FBI into “a Federal police force to intimidate, harass, and entrap American citizens that are deemed enemies of the Biden regime.” All of this came wrapped around the House decision to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (and boost his Senate campaign) because … reasons. Not good reasons. Just reasons.
Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy now seems to have picked a target to satisfy his members’ impeachment bloodlust, if he could only find a crime.
As The Hill reports, McCarthy has proposed that the Republican demand for a human sacrifice might find its ceremonial victim in Attorney General Merrick Garland, but impeachment has that pesky requirement for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” meaning McCarthy needs more than a name, he needs a justification before he can start whipping up the vote.
So what does he have?
McCarthy wants to impeach Garland because a “whistleblower,” apparently from within the IRS, claims to have knowledge of a private WhatsApp message in which Hunter Biden tried to extract money from a Chinese businessman. That whistleblower also accused the Department of Justice of giving Hunter Biden “preferential treatment” in an examination of his taxes.
“If the whistleblowers’ allegations are true, this will be a significant part of a larger impeachment inquiry into Merrick Garland’s weaponization of DOJ,” said McCarthy.
Unfortunately, for all the times that Republicans sling it around, there is no such crime as “weaponization of the DOJ” or the FBI or of any other department. It’s certainly true that these departments can be and have been aimed at individuals—see Martin Luther King Jr. and just about anyone who ever offended J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon—but impeachment requires a crime, not a buzzword.
They need to find evidence that Garland has done something like intervene to repress evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Hunter Biden. That could be hard considering U.S. Attorney David Weiss just came off a five-year investigation into Hunter Biden that resulted in two minor charges of late payment of taxes and a charge of owning a gun while using drugs.
Weiss was appointed to this task by then-Attorney General William Barr, and the first two years of the investigation were carried out under Donald Trump. If there is anything unusual in the charges, it’s that Biden is being charged at all, because these are very rarely applied charges.
McCarthy admits that there are “clear disparities” between what Weiss found and the unsubstantiated reports Republicans are waving around as part of their fundraising campaigns. He’s demanding that Weiss come back to the House and explain the issues. Garland has said he’d be happy for Weiss to make such an appearance and talk about any issues with the IRS.
While he’s at it, maybe Weiss can explain how the reported attempt to extort a Chinese billionaire happened in 2017 while President Joe Biden was no longer vice president, no longer in the Senate, and not running for anything. As Garland explained on Friday, Weiss had full authority to pursue any evidence he found, including "more authority than a special counsel would have had." He also noted that the IRS whistleblower had claimed Weiss was prohibited from looking at evidence outside Delaware, which was untrue.
While McCarthy has Weiss at the House, he might also get in a few questions about why the last “key informant” that Republicans claimed to have, this one also throwing around unsubstantiated claims about Hunter Biden, turns out to be dead. And the guy who was at the center of that supposed deal turns out to have died over three years before Hunter Biden became involved.
Of course, the requirement for McCarthy to produce a crime on which to base impeachment is only what’s in the Constitution and the law. No big deal for this crew. Republicans can write up an impeachment because they don’t like the pattern on Garland’s tie and likely find a majority to pass it.
Donald Trump was impeached, twice, on clear crimes. First he was impeached for his attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into providing false evidence against then-candidate Joe Biden. That effort not only caused delays in military assistance to Ukraine, it sent a clear signal that the United States wasn’t interested in stopping corruption. It was interested in causing corruption.
Trump’s second impeachment came from his involvement in the events of Jan. 6. Trump not only provided consistently false statements about the 2020 election, he incited violence and delayed necessary assistance to protect members of Congress and Capitol Police.
Republicans want to impeach someone, anyone, in order to gain a measure of revenge concerning Trump. That includes McCarthy voicing his support for expunging Trump’s twin impeachments. Everything they are doing is about showing their support for Trump and showing Trump supporters how willing they are to smite anyone who opposes him.
But this chart from last week shows their basic problem.
It’s not that Republicans aren’t getting plenty of opportunities to investigate their opponents. It's that Republicans keep doing all the crime. Whether it’s a special counsel or a U.S. attorney, years of investigations into Joe Biden and Hunter Biden have found no grand conspiracy or serious crime. But just a few months’ worth of investigating Trump turned up felonies literally in the dozens.
For that, Republicans want to prosecute the investigators. Maybe their “tough on crime” theme would work better if it were actually aimed at the criminals. Like Trump.
Texas has set the impeachment vote on Paxton for Saturday. They’re moving fast and getting this messy business done on a weekend where it will get reduced coverage.
If the House votes to impeach, Paxton will be removed from his position immediately until the results of his trial in the Senate. His wife is one of the states senators who will be voting on his impeachment. Considering the nature of the charges against him, her vote may be up for grabs.
On Thursday evening, a special investigative committee of the Texas Legislature officially filed charges of impeachment against state Attorney General Ken Paxton. As The Texas Tribune reports, the document includes “20 articles listing a yearslong pattern of alleged misconduct and lawbreaking.”
The chair of that committee has already announced that he will call for Paxton’s impeachment. On Wednesday, members of that committee voted unanimously that the attorney general should be impeached. If it happens, it will be a first: No attorney general has been impeached in the history of the state.
Paxton has issued a response calling the legislators members of the “corrupt political establishment,” and posted a statement on Twitter in which he called on the speaker of the Republican-led House to resign for, among other things, allowing “Chinese spies” to control Texas land. He’s also declared that Texas Republicans are tools of President Joe Biden and the Washington elite, all of which should make the upcoming hearings even more enjoyable.
Before you reach for the popcorn, here’s a reminder of some of the “accomplishments” that have marked Paxton’s career.
On Jan. 6, 2021, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stood in front of the Trump supporters gathered at the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington and delivered a speech that made clear allusions to the Civil War. “One of the great things about the state of Texas is, we did not quit,” said Paxton. “If you look at Georgia, they capitulated, they consented. We kept fighting in Texas.” That’s not exactly a record to be brought up with pride, but then there’s little to be proud about anywhere in Paxton’s record.
Just hours after he urged Trump supporters to, like Texas, “keep fighting” and watched them march toward the Capitol, Paxton swore that it wasnot Trump supporters who smashed their way into the building. “These are not Trump supporters,” Paxton wrote on Twitter. Instead he blamed the insurgency on the forces of antifa. When Paxton was asked about his sources, he said he was only reporting what he heard from a “journalist,” by which he meant the fascism-friendly conspiracy site WorldNetDaily.
Paxton topped off his Jan. 6 escapades by refusing to turn over records related to his own appearance at the rally. As with so many things related to Paxton, that battle went to court, where he did what he is so good at doing: make irrational arguments and lose. But those Jan. 6 events were just one small item on the checklist of all things Paxton.
The Texas constitution states that if Paxton is impeached in the House, he will immediately be removed from office until his trial in the Senate. Should he survive that trial, Paxton could go back to misusing his office, as he has always done.
Why is Paxton up for impeachment? Take your pick.
The FBI investigation into how Paxton used his office to illegally help a donor.
The indictment for fraud that Paxton’s Republican supporters have stalled for years, in part by blocking attorneys prosecuting the case from getting paid. As the AP pointed out, it’s not many people who can avoid going to trial on felony charges for seven straight years—and they made that point last year.
The $3.3 million that Paxton had to pay out to settle a whistleblower case after a group of his own deputies raised warnings about his actions, including “abuse of office and other crimes.”
An affair with a woman he later promoted to a high-paying job in a case so tangled it’s hard to tell if it’s bribery or extortion.
There’s also a state bar association investigation into lies Paxton told in court in an effort to overturn the 2020 election, but it’s unlikely the Republican-led legislature was upset by that point.
Both the legislature and the voters of Texas have supported Paxton over the years as he carried on a crusade of lies and distortions, becoming the poster boy for how a state attorney general’s office could be used to prosecute a political agenda. It's impossible to briefly list all the efforts Paxton has made to sue federal agencies, from the EPA and Homeland Security to Health and Human Services. However, among the “highlights,” Paxton has:
Tried to enact a complex system for collecting child support payments, including another failed attempt to sue the federal government that ended up going hundreds of millions over budget and left children without support payments for months.
Sued four other states for failing to run their elections according to Paxton’s view of the law, an effort that garnered a scathing reply from the attorneys general of those states, as well as a blunt rejection by the Supreme Court, saying that Paxton had “not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”
Hard to believe he lost, considering that Paxton’s lawsuit included “evidence” from the debunked film “2,000 Mules.”
Somehow, through all this, Texas voters still put Paxton in office by a wide margin. That includes returning him to office in 2020 despite three felony indictments and a public investigation by the FBI. Paxton has the biggest selling point of any Republican candidate: He knows how to hate the right people. So don’t be surprised if being impeached is not his last act.
How can Democrats win the messaging war? It turns out there's actually a science to it, as strategic communications consultant Anat Shenker-Osorio tells us on this week's episode of "The Downballot." Shenker-Osorio explains how her research shows the importance of treating voters as protagonists; how Democrats can avoid ceding "freedom" to Republicans by emphasizing "freedoms," plural; and why it actually makes sense to call out "MAGA Republicans" (even though, yes, it's all Republicans).
The federal grand jury seated by special counsel Jack Smith has reportedly heard additional testimony from former Homeland Security officials about Donald Trump’s efforts to seize voting machines following the 2020 election. CNN reports that both former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and former Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli testified that Trump went ahead with plans to seize the machines even though they repeatedly told him that he did not have this authority.
A report in January revealed that Trump had drafted at least two versions of an executive order in December 2021, directing the military to seize voting machines after discussions with convicted former national security advisor Michael Flynn and retired Col. Phil Waldron. Waldron was also the author of an extensive presentation in which he claimed that the voting machines had been tampered with by foreign governments. He urged Trump to declare a national emergency and use U.S. marshals and National Guard troops to manage a “secure” election. Trump and Waldron reportedly had multiple meetings with Trump and took his “how to overthrow democracy” slideshow around Washington, where it was played for Republican members of Congress, who were eager to participate.
The latest testimony apparently focused on Wolf and Cuccinelli telling the jury that Trump continued in these efforts even though they told him repeatedly he did not have the authority to seize the machines. Additional testimony on the subject came from former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, but this was reportedly given to investigators in a closed-door meeting, not to the jury.
All of this testimony shows that Smith’s investigation is focusing heavily on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election that extended beyond the specific scheme on Jan. 6.
As CBS notes, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that Trump could not shield former staff members from testifying before the grand jury under claims of executive privilege. That ruling is likely to mean that Cuccinelli, Wolf, and O’Brien will spend more time with the grand jury. It will also mean that Mark Meadows and others who have previously avoided such testimony are likely out of options.
Much of this testimony appears to be new information not heard in either Trump’s impeachment trial or previous investigations.
The House Select Committee did have one of the drafts of Trump’s executive order, one that ordered the Department of Defense to take charge of the voting machines. That order contained a vast collection of improbable and unsupportable claims, including that the voting machines had been altered by “a massive cyber-attack by foreign interests,” that the machines “intentionally generated high number of errors,” and that voter databases could not be trusted because they had been “hacked by Iran.” It also leans heavily on a “forensic analysis,” which actually confused counties in Michigan and Minnesota. The order ended by instructing officials to take seven steps, starting with:
“Effective immediately, the Secretary of Defense shall seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records...”
That the jury is hearing this testimony means that Smith is interpreting his writ beyond the narrow confines of just how Trump’s actions contributed to violence on Jan. 6 but all the ways that Trump sought to undermine the election. It’s also unlikely that the jury would be hearing this testimony unless Smith thought there was a good possibility that it would support criminal charges.
Now that the appeals court has removed another layer of doubt around whether or not Trump could halt some testimony—no, he can’t—Cipollone and O’Brien are also likely to be asked about an infamous Oval Office meeting in mid-December. That was the “rancorous meeting” at which Trump, Flynn, attorney Sidney Powell, and others launched so deeply into sedition that even Mark Meadows reportedly turned away. Cipollone and O’Brien were reportedly first-hand witnesses to that event.
Between Waldron’s military coup presentation, attorney John Eastman’s plan for declaring Trump the winner on Jan. 6, the Jeffrey Clark plan to replace the attorney general and declare the vote invalid in several states, the scheme laid out for Pence to simply ignore the vote in seven states, and straight out calls for violence and threats on Jan. 6, Trump tested the waters on just about every illegal option he could use to make himself dictator. Smith has plenty to look at.
All that came after every possible legal remedy, including requests for recounts, were rejected, and it’s not even considering the efforts Trump made in deliberately leaning on local officials in Georgia.
If a federal grand jury is hearing testimony, it’s because Jack Smith thinks they need to hear it. They’re likely to hear a lot more.
Donald Trump set the record by being impeached in the House of Representatives twice, both times for very good cause. The first of those impeachments came when Trump attempted to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into providing false claims about Joe Biden in exchange for military support. The second after Trump tired of threatening other nations and directly attempted to overturn the results of a U.S. election.
Now Republicans want to get out the Wite-Out and “expunge” at least one of Trump’s impeachments—both would be better—and Kevin McCarthy is there for it.
In laying out all the critical challenges the House faces, McCarthy didn’t seem sure how they would fit this in between investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and pretending to build a wall, but as The Washington Postreports, the modern record-holder in losing votes for the House speakership expressed “sympathy” for the idea of giving Trump a clean slate because of all Trump “went through” during investigations into his connections to Russia.
This might not be the best time to pretend that withholding military assistance from Ukraine had nothing to do with Trump’s ties to Russia, and McCarthy might want to revisit the nation’s most overlooked document, the report produced by a Republican-led Senate committee showing Trump’s numerous, substantial, and dangerous connections to Russia. But hey, none of that really matters because none of this has anything to do with reality.
Even on the surface, McCarthy’s suggestion that Trump get a do-over because people had been mean to him is ridiculous. There are few judges on Earth willing to accept “I was having a bad day” as an excuse for a crime of any size. Trump’s elaborate efforts to secure false statements from Ukraine to help him defeat Joe Biden in the election weren’t a matter of a few statements in one very much not “perfect” phone call. As the investigators showed during his impeachment trial, Trump’s attempts to wring arms in Ukraine extended back over months, and included false stories funneled through Rudy Giuliani that were handily published by The New York Times. The threat posed by this attempt is currently being vividly illustrated just north of Bakhmut.
When it comes to the second impeachment, the evidence for that impeachment is still visible in damage to the building where Congress sits. It’s also still very much on the minds of Americans. As Kerry Eleveld wrote today, Americans remain intensely aware of the damage done to the nation through the Jan. 6 insurrection as well as Trump’s involvement. That connection was not only confirmed in the impeachment investigation, but underlined by the findings of the Jan. 6 select committee. The voting that took place in November can be seen as a verdict on how America feels about the former seditionist-in-chief.
… the Jan. 6 panel's ingenuity in making Trump central to the story and indicting him in the court of public opinion was the key to making his endorsees utterly toxic on the campaign trail.
Neither of Trump’s impeachments was over a trivial matter. They were historic abuses of power that went well beyond the crimes of any recent leader, including Richard Nixon. Neither of those impeachments were partisan, except in the sense that the modern Republican Party would not indict Trump for anything, no matter how terrible.
What did the holder of the limp gavel think about Trump’s actions following Jan. 6? As Rebekah Sager reported in April, McCarthy was a bit less willing to give Trump a pass at the time. In fact, McCarthy and other Republican leaders believed that “Trump was directly responsible for the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol” and reportedly told other Republicans in Congress that they would ask Trump to resign. But that was, of course, before McCarthy touched base with his funders, checked in with the most radical faction of his party, or surrendered the House to people who think he’s a dunce.
Now the only real question is … can they? Can House Republicans actually hand Trump a clean record?
Not in any practical sense, of course. What Trump did, the impeachments that it generated, and the way that Mitch McConnell used his control of the Senate to protect Trump from conviction are already a part of the public record. Donald Trump was impeached in the House, twice, and nothing is going to change that.
That doesn’t mean that Republicans can’t still show their infinite loyalty to Trump and once again shove America’s collective nose into the idea that justice has any meaning for those at the top of the pyramid. It just means it would be worse than pointless.
There is no mechanism in the Constitution that allows an impeachment to be expunged. Yes, say Republicans, but there’s also nothing in the Constitution that says an impeachment can’t be expunged. So there.
This is true, precisely because the authors of the document likely recognized the boneheaded uselessness of any such expungement. Any impeachment is, by necessity, an expression of the will of the sitting House of Representatives in the current Congress. A new Congress can certainly issue a statement disagreeing with the opinion of a past House, but that new statement in no way invalidates the opinion of the House that issued the impeachment in the first place.
They cannot make it as if this never happened. It happened. It will literally be in the history books … assuming those books are edited by Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott.
The fact that Republicans are even talking about this makes it likely that they’re going to try it. In fact, Republicans put even more pointless bills before the House twice already that would have expunged both impeachments, even though they knew those bills would go nowhere. Because this isn’t about justice. It’s about show.
Letting the Republicans once again show that protecting Donald Trump’s ego is their highest priority? Sure. Let them.
On this date three years ago, a man walked into Hubei Provincial Hospital in Wuhan, China, reporting flu-like symptoms. Within two weeks, there were 27 cases showing similar symptoms. Then, just four days before the end of the year, the head of the hospital’s respiratory department, Dr. Zhang Jixian, made a report to state health officials that the cases were caused by “a novel coronavirus.” At that point, the number of known infections was approaching 180.
Dec. 1 may have been the official start of the local novel coronavirus outbreak that would become a national epidemic that would become the COVID-19 pandemic. But it certainly wasn’t the first actual case. As early as March 2020, a review of health records suggested that the first case had actually been seen in Wuhan as early as Nov. 17, and that there had been a steady trickle of new cases for two weeks before that first official case.
It would take another two years before scientists were able to pin down what had been suspected all along—the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost certainly the “wet” market in Wuhan, where a wide variety of wild-caught animals were sold for food and traditional medicine. A similar market was the source of the original SARS virus in 2002. A combination of health care records and genetic information suggests that the virus made the jump from animals to humans at least twice in the closing months of 2019, though exactly which animal played host to the virus before it made the jump remains unclear.
With all that, it’s hard to give an official date for when the pandemic that has now generated at least 650 million cases and 6.6 million deaths around the world really began. But today is as good a day as any to say, “This is the day the world changed.”
To mark this third anniversary, it seems like a good time to hit some “highlights” of the pandemic’s early days and how it was covered at Daily Kos—much of which, I’m going to tell you right now, easily devolves into “look at all the stuff I got wrong.”
Dec. 31, 2019 — A doctor in China unofficially notifies World Health Organization (WHO) that it has detected a cluster of cases involving “a pneumonia of unknown etiology.” China would send an official notification to WHO on Jan. 3.
Jan. 21, 2020 — China confirms that the disease is spreading from person to person. At this point, the number of known cases in China is approaching 300, and there are single cases known in Japan, Thailand, and South Korea.
Jan. 23, 2020 — The first article on the outbreak at Daily Kos. That article got some things right.
The outbreak that began near the city of Wuhan is caused by a coronavirus, one of a number of viruses in a poorly understood group that also includes SARS. … The ease with which the new virus is apparently spread through the air, or through superficial contact, suggests that it may be transferred even more readily than the SARS virus, which killed at least 800 in its initial outbreak.
And some things very, very wrong.
...officials everywhere have been faster to act, faster to impose restrictions, and faster to identify the underlying cause of the outbreak than they had been in the case of SARS. Restricting the spread of an emerging disease remains a near-impossible task, but health officials around the world are giving it a really extraordinary try.
Jan. 31, 2020 — It would be a week before the novel coronavirus reached the front page of Daily Kos again. In our defense, there were a few things going on at the time—such as Donald Trump facing his first impeachment trial in the Senate. That second article actually came on the same day that the House impeachment managers wrapped up their case. Even at this point, what would become a very familiar theme was starting to emerge. And so was that theme of getting something right, followed by getting something else so very wrong.
... it is time to consider the possible effects of prolonged disruption from interrupted supply chains, shortages of items manufactured in China, or further restrictions of travel and trade. Companies, educational facilities, and city managers are already looking at what it could mean if there is an extended disruption of normal activities—not because the coronavirus is likely to have the devastating reach of the 1918 flu, but because the steps necessary to arrest its spread may mean taking unfamiliar actions.
At that point, the frequency of covered increased sharply—which included me providing now highly cringe-worthy praise of China’s management of the outbreak—and it wouldn’t be a week before the “P” word was being thrown around.
Feb. 5, 2020 — What had started with a tiny cluster of cases a month earlier was now approaching 25,000, and small numbers of cases had appeared in an astounding 24 countries. It was a testimony to both how easily the SARS-CoV-2 virus could be spread, and to how interconnected our world has become.
Still, 2019-nCoV is not yet a global pandemic. Despite some alarming cases, including a number of infections aboard a now-quarantined cruise ship, it remains an outbreak with just one real epicenter. However, keeping things that way is going to be difficult. And expensive.
Feb. 6, 2020 — Just a day later came news of the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, one of a group of doctors in Wuhan who had risked their careers to buck both local and state officials and get out the news about the initial outbreak. Li was a previously healthy 34-year-old. His death would make him not just a martyr to the case of transparency, but a signpost for how bad things might become. Even so, half of the post this day was devoted to staying hopeful that the outbreak in China was slowing down, that measures seemed to be preventing a similar outbreak elsewhere, and hey, didn’t SARS burn out just a few weeks after its first appearance?
It would be easy to present a version of this story that played up all the things that were right in these early articles—showing that this virus would be more transmissible than SARS, warnings about the need for quick intervention to isolate cases when detected, walking through the evidence to show that the virus was not the product of a weapons lab, and predictions about coming impacts to fragile international supply chains—but there was just as much wrong. That included praising policy in China that was not only brutal, but may have contributed to spreading the disease by encouraging people to hide symptoms. There was also a lot of happy, hopeful, “don’t panic” talk that utterly missed the boat on the real scale of the threat and the necessary steps to check the coming pandemic. Also, as happened way too many times over the next year, I repeatedly got lost in the statistics, grinding away at numbers to see if I could squeeze just one hint of a rainbow out of all those dark clouds.
The level of naivete can easily be expressed by this headline from Feb. 11, 2020.
It’s safe to say the answer was “yes.” The number of deaths would double in one week, and of course, that was barely the start of a graph that would lead to 6,641,418, as of today.
Three years later, reviewing those early reports about what would eventually be the COVID-19 pandemic leaves me with a lot of embarrassment. It’s hard to find anything in there that seems all that prescient—or all that useful—this far down the line.
One thing that does stand out in these early reports is just how rarely Donald Trump gets mentioned in connection with the virus, because that’s how little he was involved in doing anything about it. It wouldn’t be until Feb. 26, 2020, that Trump finally got around to creating his infamous task force on the virus, the one that Mike Pence would nominally lead, but which Trump would turn into a platform for promoting quack cures and attacking science.
That came one day after what may have been the most accurate statement issued by any official to that point.
On Tuesday, Nancy Messonier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, one of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that Americans can expect to see the COVID-19 coronavirus spread within the United States, and that “disruption to everyday life may be severe.“ Messonier acknowledged in a press briefing, “This whole situation may seem overwhelming,” before revealing that she had been warning her own children that they needed to prepare for what’s coming. “Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country. It’s not so much a question of if this will happen any more, but rather more exactly when this will happen, and how many people in this country will have severe illness.”
After making that statement, Messonier was carefully removed from public speaking roles, sidelined from her daily briefings, and not made a part of Trump’s task force.
But no one may have given a better summary of what was coming than she did less than two months after the first announcement from WHO.
Kashyap Patel, former aide to Devin Nunes turned one of Donald Trump’s closest advisors, has been granted limited immunity to secure his testimony before the grand jury investigating the theft of classified documents and their illegal retention at Mar-a-Lago.
The Wall Street Journal reports that in an earlier appearance before the grand jury, Patel repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, making it impossible to gain meaningful information. Attorneys for the Department of Justice attempted to get the presiding judge to force Patel to provide information relevant to the investigation, and argued that none of the questions they were asking were directed at surfacing any criminal action by Patel, but the judge ruled that Patel could not be made to testify without immunity on the basis of possible future action. Now Patel will get that immunity and will make a second appearance before the grand jury.
When headlines announce that someone will testify on a grant of immunity, it is generally taken to mean that some kind of deal has been reached. That is not the case here. Patel does not want to testify. He remains a hostile witness. He’s just not being given any choice. And the fact that the DOJ is willing to give him immunity to hear what he has to say shows that this investigation has just one real target.
Patel is the only person who claims to be a witness to Trump declassifying the documents found at Mar-a-Lago. Speaking to Breitbart News, Patel said, “I was there with President Trump when he said, ‘We are declassifying this information.’”
It’s a fair bet that this unique claim was one of the first things that Patel was asked about when he was brought before the grand jury. And one of the first issues was he pulled out the Fifth Amendment. Now he will be facing that question again, and will have nowhere to hide. It’s a good bet that his answer will not match what he told Breitbart.
That is, if Patel chooses to answer at all. The fact that he declared he didn’t have to testify under the protection provided by the Fifth Amendment is interesting just in itself. Because it means that Patel did not try to slip testimony on the basis of executive privilege.
That could mean that the questions Patel was being asked all concerned issues that arose after Trump left office. Or it might mean that Patel was saving that executive privilege claim in his other pocket, for just this occasion.
Patel first gained the favor of Donald Trump by helping former congressman Nunes write a memo that put FBI sources and methods at risk in an effort to undercut the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Patel became a frequent visitor to the White House and joined Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine in attempting to find dirt on Hunter Biden. As his “Ukraine whisperer,” Trump made Patel an aide to the National Security Council. Trump considered Patel his Ukraine expert during the efforts to blackmail the Ukrainian government that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Patel next helped get Sec. of Defense Mark Esper fired by declaring Esper’s refusal to send the army against Black Lives Matter protesters “disloyal” to Trump. Trump rewarded Patel’s own loyalty by making him chief of staff to the new Secretary of Defense. Patel was reportedly Trump’s pick to head the CIA—a sharp rise from a congressional aide in just three years—when a little matter of getting tossed from the office got in the way.
During his time in Washington, Patel developed a well-earned reputation as a man who would cut any corner, and stab any back, to get closer to Trump. As a Pentagon official told The Washington Post last year, Patel was simply “a direct threat to lawful government.”
More recently, Patel has been in the news as one of Trump’s chief spokesmen on the classified documents that the FBI removed from Mar-a-Lago following a warranted search. Unsurprisingly, Patel has been the leader of the “Trump declassified them all, so he did nothing wrong” choir.
However, no matter how many times Trump has made that claim in public, he hasn’t done so in court. He hasn’t done it, because he knows that it’s a lie. As a quick check of just one recent and relevant case shows… “declassification, even by the President, must follow established procedures.” Declassification of highly compartmentalized documents regarding the nuclear capacity of another nation must follow lengthy and detailed steps leading to declassification, none of which involves Trump “just thinking about it.”
The immunity grant for Patel took effect on Wednesday, signaling that his testimony before the jury has either already happened, or will happen soon. As with all grand jury testimony, it’s unlikely that any of it will be made public. However, should that jury issue indictments, Patel is likely to be given the opportunity for an encore.
