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A court late last month said GEO Group had to pay detained immigrants the minimum wage (or higher) for their forced labor at the Northwest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center (NWIPC) in Washington state. The private prison profiteer had been forcing them to labor for $1 a day under a so-called voluntary program. The court also ruled that the company owed more than $23 million in unpaid wages and damages. But the Associated Press (AP) now reports that “rather than pay the detainees minimum wage,” the multi-billion dollar company has instead “suspended the Voluntary Work Program while it appeals.”

Immigrants detained at NWIPC had been forced to cook, clean, and maintain the facility under the forced program. But because GEO Group suspended the program, none of that’s getting done, detained immigrants told the AP. “It got really gross—nobody cleaned anything,” Ivan Sanchez said in the report. “We pick up after ourselves, but nobody sweeps or mops. The guards were saying it wasn’t their job to clean the toilets. … It caused a lot of animosity between the detainees and the officers because of that.”

This is a choice. GEO Group has the resources to get that taken care of by professionals. It plainly, shamelessly, admitted so in asking the judge overseeing the case to pause the rulings. “The corporation wrote that it has enough money on hand ‘to pay the Judgments twenty times over,’ but said it disagreed with the decisions,” the AP continued. Immigrants said in the report that GEO Group’s suspension is further hurting them because their wages, even though meager, went to purchasing basic items at the commissary. Now GEO Group has cut them off completely.

“While detainees are looking forward to a potential payout, ‘there’s a lot of people in here that that dollar makes a difference,’ Soares said,” the report continued.

In addition to ordering GEO Group to pay immigrants the state’s minimum wage or higher for their work, the court said the company owed $17.3 million to workers. Several days later, the court ordered GEO Group to pay Washington $5.9 million, saying the company “enriched itself by its unfair and unjust practice.” 

“In 2018, GEO reported $2.33 billion in revenue, an increase from $2.18 billion in 2016,” said Investigate, a project of the American Friends Service Committee. GEO Group’s federal contracts have been by far its most lucrative agreements. “ICE contracts represent GEO Group’s single largest source of revenue accounting for 28 percent, an increase from 18 percent in 2015,” Investigate said. While President Biden pledged an end to the government’s use of for-profit prisons, GEO Group just recently gained a new contract.

Like previously noted, thousands of immigrants have borne the brunt of GEO Group’s greed. “While officials portray the labor program as ‘voluntary’ in light of the 13th amendment of the US constitution, detained immigrants are often penalized for refusing to work,” Project South legal and advocacy director Azadeh Shahshahani wrote in The Guardian back in 2018. Some have been punished with solitary confinement, which is torture, for trying to refuse to work.

GEO Group itself has admitted it has the resources to pay immigrants—again, “the corporation wrote that it has enough money on hand ‘to pay the Judgments twenty times over,’” is what the AP reported—but it refuses to. It’s also lying in the process. “Some detainees were given a GEO memo that day explaining they could no longer perform the work they used to do; the memo falsely said ICE had suspended the work program, according to an image provided to the AP,” the report continued.

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As Daily Kos has continued to cover, Republicans have been more than happy to scapegoat trans Americans and stir faux outrage about trans youth having even the most basic dignities and opportunities, especially while at school. We’ve seen, for example, Republicans push discriminatory sports bills that aim to keep trans youth from participating on teams that align with their gender identity, as well as bills trying to bar trans youth from receiving safe, age-appropriate, gender-affirming medical care.

Some of these bills have fizzled in committee, while some have been signed into law by Republican governors. Either way, however, we know trans youth report disproportionate levels of bullying, discrimination, and harassment when compared to cisgender peers. A recent incident comes to us from the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area,  where a 14-year-old trans girl, Willow Andring, says she was called names and attacked at her school because of her gender identity. According to Willow’s mom, her daughter suffered a concussion from the attack.

Heather Andring, Willow’s mother, told local outlet Pittsburgh Action 4 News she was “shocked and sad and sort of in disbelief” about what happened. “You feel all the emotions as to worried about your kid,” she continued, you have some anger, you’re upset, but then it kind of has sunk in.”

Willow told local outlet CBS Pittsburgh that a male student attacked her at the bottom of the stairs on Oct. 27. “He pulled me from behind and started beating me up,” she recalled, adding that prior to the attack, he called her names and referred to her as “it.” Willow said that the student’s attacks had started as verbal harassment in the lunchroom earlier that same day. A fellow student caught part of the physical attack on video. 

According to Newsweek, Manor Township Police are investigating the incident at Armstrong Junior-Senior High School, but no charges have been filed. And if this school sounds vaguely remember, it’s possibly because students made headlines after chanting offensive remarks toward a competitor’s female goalie during an ice hockey game. 

Willow’s mother attended a school board meeting on Monday night where she urged the community to change the culture at the school and work on important issues.

“We are listening and we are certainly willing to work with the community and the administration to do whatever it takes to be proactive and not reactive to this problem and promote change,” a school board member said in response to Andring’s comments, as reported by LGBTQ Nation.

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Workers at three Starbucks stores in the Buffalo area are seeking to unionize, and Starbucks management is going all out to try to block it. If these workers are successful, it would be a first at a corporate-owned Starbucks store, setting a precedent that raises the stakes for an anti-union company. After all, if workers in Buffalo do it, workers in other places might start getting ideas.

Ballots were supposed to go out to workers on Wednesday, but on Monday, Starbucks asked the National Labor Relations Board to delay the election and, instead of following the NLRB regional office’s decision to hold three separate elections at the three stores where workers have sought union elections, hold a single union election for all Starbucks stores in the Buffalo area. Starbucks couldn’t make it more clear that it thinks it will lose a fair election in the three stores where workers have called for union representation elections, so it wants to change the rules.

That move comes as part of a broader barrage of anti-union activity from Starbucks management. On Saturday, the company closed its Buffalo stores during a talk by former CEO Howard Schultz, giving workers the completely voluntary chance to attend the talk, in which Schultz offered veiled anti-union messaging, including a questionably appropriate story about the Holocaust. In recent months, corporate also sent extra managers to the stores, supposedly to help make sure things were running smoothly. Go figure, they made workers feel surveilled and intimidated. 

At one of the three stores where all 20 of the existing workers wanted a union, there are now 46 workers eligible to vote on the issue. While workers had complained of understaffing, that is an effort to overwhelm pro-union workers, not to respond to worker complaints.

“A recent visit to a Starbucks near the airport, where workers have filed for a union election, turned up at least nine baristas behind the counter but only a handful of customers,” The New York Times’ Noam Scheiber reported in October, while a worker told him, “Even if you’re just trying to run to the back to grab a gallon of milk, you now have to run an obstacle course to fit between all the folks who have no real reason to be there.”

In October, amid both the union effort and a competitive environment for retail and foodservice companies looking for workers, Starbucks announced a pay increase to a minimum of $15 an hour with an average of $17 an hour by next summer.

Even if you don’t count that pay increase as part of the anti-union effort—and it did come as other companies were making similar moves—Starbucks is just pouring money into keeping workers from unionizing. Add it up: They brought multiple corporate managers into Buffalo. They brought Howard Schultz in and closed stores while he was speaking. They have moved workers around and hired more workers to dramatically increase staffing at one of the stores. They’re making a last-minute attempt to change the rules of the election. It’s reasonably safe to assume that lurking somewhere in the background is an expensive anti-union consultant or law firm.

Worker organizing and worker power-building are terrifying Starbucks. It’s pushing back hard, using many of the tried-and-true union avoidance tactics that corporate America has honed over decades, trying to squash the union effort before it can get off the ground and spread. Now the NLRB will decide whether the company gets its last-minute rules change. 

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A former Georgia cop testified on Monday in the high-profile trial of another former cop, his son, and neighbor, who are charged with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Former Glynn County Police Officer Ricky Minshew said that, while he saw Ahmaud Arbery lying face-down in a “puddle of blood” and heard him breathing, the officer—who was the first to arrive on the scene—made no effort to render aid. 

“Well, when I got there I did not know any of the people or any of the facts or circumstances to what had happened,” said Ricky Minshew, who CNN identified as a former Glynn County Police officer. “The only thing I knew that I observed was a body laying in the middle of the roadway that had just bled out, and it was by apparent gunfire.”

“So being that I was the only officer on scene,” he continued, “without having any other police units to watch my back, there was no way that I could switch my attention to anything medical and still be able to watch my surroundings and watch after my own safety. I also did not have the adequate medical training.”

Minshew testified that he worked for the Brunswick Police Department for one year before going on to work for the Glenn County Police Department’s patrol division for two years. He then went into retail management for four years before returning to the Glenn County Police Department. He had only been back seven months when he responded to the “suspicious person” call that ended in Arbery’s death.

“When I first come in the neighborhood, I didn’t hear anything,” Minshew testified. “As I go a little further down Satilla Drive, I hear two loud pop sounds. They were within a couple seconds apart.” He said he knew it was either a firearm or fireworks, so he continued driving, and saw someone flagging him down. Minshew said he later stopped at an intersection, got out of his patrol car, and activated his body camera with a double tap.

“I see two males there in front of me, and I observed a Black male laying in the middle of the roadway, and he was covered in blood.” The two unharmed men were pacing, and the bleeding man later identified as Arbery was “laying face down on his stomach in the puddle of blood,” Minshew testified.

“I heard like an agonal breathing. I’ve always heard it being called a death rattle,” Minshew said. He testified that he had heard the sound before when responding to a suicide and multiple vehicle fatalities. but when asked if he attempted “any CPR or anything like that on the deceased male,” Minshew said, “I did not, no ma’am.”

The case centering former Georgia cop and prosecutorial investigator Gregory McMichael, his son Travis, and local resident William “Roddie” Bryan has been hammered with allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, an incomplete police investigation, and more recently, a biased voir dire process leading to a jury with only one Black person on it.

Defense attorneys, however, have claimed repeatedly that it’s their clients who stand to be treated unfairly. They sought in one motion to ban from the trial a photo of a vanity plate with a Confederate emblem that was on Travis McMichael’s truck when Arbery was killed. The McMichaels said through their attorneys in the motion that the state’s goal is to “draw the conclusion the Mr. Arbery saw the vanity plate, that he interpreted its meaning, and that he feared the occupants in the truck because of this vanity plate, which is why he ran away from the truck.”

Prosecutors responded in a motion that “the State will present the facts of this case, and one of those facts is that Travis McMichael purchased a new truck sometime after January 1, 2020, and put this vanity plate on it.”

Watch the trial live below:

RELATED: Trial for Ahmaud Arbery murder begins with brutal video one defendant thought would prove his case

RELATED: Arbery judge: Seating one Black juror seems to be ‘intentional discrimination.’ Same judge: Oh well

RELATED: Travis McMichael is actively trying to keep his Confederate vanity plate out of his murder trial

RELATED: Murder trial in Ahmaud Arbery case is not about Arbery’s past, judge rules in vital decision

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Speaker Nancy Pelosi remains firm on a timeline for passing the $1.75 trillion budget reconciliation bill that contains President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan. She reiterated in a press conference Tuesday from Glasgow, where she is attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference, that the House will vote sometime next week on the bill.

The conservative Democrats in the House who have been holding up progress on that bill vowed last week that they would agree to for Build Back Better “in no event later than the week of November 15th” in an agreement made with Rep. Pramila Jayapal, leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. That agreement resulted in the CPC agreeing to help pass the hard infrastructure bill and delinking the two bills. The conservatives’ agreement, however, was predicated on receiving “fiscal information” from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That part of the commitment from the group could be dicey, as the CBO released a statement Tuesday, giving no definite timeline for a full cost estimate beyond “as soon as practicable.”

They do, however, “anticipate releasing estimates for individual titles of the bill as we complete them, some of which will be released this week.” So that “fiscal information” will start coming this week, but will that be enough for the Sabotage Squad (thanks again Greg Sargent, for that nickname), or will they hold out for the full cost estimate? They do say they “remain committed to working to resolve any discrepancies in order to pass the Build Back Better legislation,” but that could mean anything. Like continuing to delay its passage to give Senate Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema time to carve more good stuff out of it in the name of “resolving discrepancies” in cost estimates.

“Our colleagues are committed to voting for the transformative Build Back Better Act, as currently written, no later than the week of November 15,” Rep. Jayapal said in a statement Friday night, addressing the agreement they had reached before the vote. “All of our colleagues have also committed to voting tonight on the rule to move the Build Back Better Act forward to codify this promise,” she added. They did do that, they passed the rule to move the bill forward, but there’s still this caveat hanging out there that is the CBO.

As a reminder, here’s some of what’s left in the BBB plan, the one those Democrats keep chipping away at. There’s another year’s worth of expanded, monthly Child Tax Credit payments of as much as $300 per child, that program from the COVID-19 relief bill Biden got passed in March that has reduced childhood hunger. The original plan was to make that permanent, then to extend it through 2025, and now mainstream Democrats are fighting to keep one more year of it.

There’s also universal pre-K for three- and four-year-old children. The goal is to provide $400 billion for pre-K and to lower the cost of childcare, holding family spending on it for most families at no more than 7% of income. A third key family program is paid family and medical leave, which has been dropped from up to 12 weeks of paid leave to four weeks and then dropped entirely by the White House. The House, however, put the program back into their bill at four weeks. It’s on thin ice right now.

One big win, though it’s a small provision, is that it will cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month, for insured people, anyway. That’s for everyone with insurance, both Medicare and private insurance. It would take effect immediately. In addition to that, it includes a cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for Medicare enrollees at $2,000/year, with a smoothing proposal that will allow seniors to pay a monthly installment to cover those costs, rather than each time they fill their prescriptions.

It has a number of other health care provisions that will make insurance under the Affordable Care Act even more affordable and, as of now, provide a means for the 2 million people left in the Medicaid gap in states that refused expansion under the ACA to get free or extremely low-cost Obamacare coverage. It would also punish non-expansion states by reducing payments they get in Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital payments and federal funding for uncompensated care pools—the two programs that reimburse hospitals and providers for providing care to the uninsured. That theoretically wouldn’t hurt the low-income people or the hospitals in those states, because they would now have private insurance to cover their care. The bill would also provide health coverage for new moms on Medicaid for a full 12 months after giving birth.

It would permanently fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and require states to keep children in the program for a full 12 months regardless of fluctuations in household income. Families at this income level often teeter in and out of qualifying for the program. This change would ensure stable coverage for kids, even as their families’ income rises above the income threshold throughout the year.

The $400 billion Biden wanted for home- and community-based care for disabled and elderly people has been cut down to $150 billion, but it’s still in there. It would help keep people who don’t need the level of care that requires they be in a nursing home at home, and it would raise wages for those homecare workers, hopefully growing that workforce and thus shortening the waiting list for these services. There’s also Medicare coverage for hearing care, which is new, but coverage for vision and dental is out, although there’s been talk of making the coverage of all three – mandatory under Medicaid, so low-income seniors would at least have that.

The bulk of the spending in the bill, $550 billion of it, goes to fighting climate change, including tax credits for clean energy production and the manufacture of clean energy technology components. It increases tax credits for the purchase of electric cars and clean technology like solar panels, as well as their manufacture. The original mix of carrots (tax credits and grants) and sticks (fines and penalties for delaying the transition to clean energy production) is pretty much all carrots now. However—and this is fairly big—the House text includes a fee for oil and gas operators per metric ton of released methane. It also includes the sweetener of $775 million in grants, rebates, and loans to oil and gas operators to help reduce and monitor methane emissions.

So, yeah. Big, important stuff that would be very good to have passed before the end of the year. If for no other reason than to make sure that the monthly child tax credit payments don’t dry up. The reality for House Democrats, including the Sabotage Squad, is that the Senate is going to make changes anyway and the CBO score will be subject to those changes. Just getting the damned thing moving, building momentum, and not giving Manchin and Sinema time to derail it on the Senate side is going to be the key to salvaging the plan.

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The first Black principal of Colleyville Heritage High School in Grapevine, Texas, has lost his job after a months-long battle with the school board, which accused him of teaching and promoting critical race theory (CRT) in his school.

Just a month after Dr. James Whitfield wrote a letter decrying the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, saying systemic racism was “alive and well” and that “education is the key to stomping out ignorance, hate, and systemic racism,” Stetson Clark, a former school board candidate at Grapevine-Colleyville High School, called for the principal’s firing. 

“He is encouraging the disruption and destruction of our district,” Clark said, July 26, 2020, according to the Texas Tribune. 

Whitfield received a disciplinary letter from the district a few weeks later and was placed on administrative leave soon after that. In late July, the board then recommended a proposal not to renew Whitfield’s contract for the 2022-2023 school year. 

In addition to Whitfield’s email condemning the deaths of Black folk, the mostly white Texas community, had issues with the fact that Whitfield has a white wife and his participation on a district-approved panel about diverse differences. 

And even though the school district acknowledges that CRT was never taught in the school, these Karens and Brandons have elected to offer the principal a settlement in lieu of keeping him in his job. 

Monday, the school board voted unanimously to fire him. 

A joint statement from Whitfield and the school board gave the following rationale: 

”Both the District and Dr. Whitfield each strongly believe they are in the right. However, each also agrees that the division in the community about this matter has impacted the education of the District’s students… The District and Dr. Whifield have mutually agreed to resolve their disputes.” 

“Educators are fighting this battle. And it’s a battle that’s been manufactured,” Whitfield told NBC News’ Antonia Hylton about how he came to lose his job and how parents and students are responding to the decision.

“No teacher is teaching critical race theory in schools, but what they’ve termed to be critical race theory. Which are diverse books, which you’ve seen in Texas. A list of hundreds of books they want to have removed or investigated. And teachers are worried about what they’re bringing to their classrooms or the resources they’ve been given,” he tells NBC News. 

Texas is one of the eight states with broad laws banning the teaching of CRT. 

The irony of Whitfield’s case is that the majority of the community is in disagreement with the decision and believes it’s based on racism and discomfort with Whitfield himself. 

The issue of CRT ended up being at the dead center of the recent Virginia gubernatorial election. A rallying cry of Virginia moms created a groundswell many are crediting with the win of Glenn Youngkin to the post.

But, digging in a bit more deeply, The Daily Beast found that several of most vehement Virginia’s anti-CRT groups had backing by lobbying firms, Koch groups, former Trump officials, and The Federalist Society.

When Whitfield was suspended from his job in September, several local Grapevine residents spoke up on his behalf. 

“I grew up in the Jim Crow South, and what’s going on here is not particularly new. It’s an old playbook,” one resident, who said mentioned that she lived in the area for 10 years, said, according to the Daily Beast.

“But to beat it, we need to start being very clear about what’s OK and what’s not OK—or we’re going to continue being bullied by a reactionary minority.”

“It is not OK to make baseless accusations about what our schools are teaching, particularly when all you know about the topic is what’s been told by professional propagandists. It is not OK to demonstrate contempt for another human being by making salacious comments about his family… To the board: It is not OK to punish a respected educator for defending himself when you could not find the intestinal fortitude to defend him as you, yourself, should’ve done.”

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No doubt, when Republican Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona tweeted out a fantasy anime video showing him killing his Democratic colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and attacking President Biden, he intended it as a “gotcha” that would “trigger the libs.” But the video itself, apparently created by his staff, was also a dogwhistle signal to the white-nationalist audience that Gosar has been cultivating in the past year and longer.

The anime series and manga comic book that is the source for the video’s scenes, Attack on Titan, is in fact one of the white-nationalist alt-right’s favorite manga. That’s because the series is ripe with fascist themes and ill-concealed antisemitism, particularly in its storyline about a nefarious race of overlords manipulating human conflict.

The scenes in Gosar’s video show the series’ chief protagonist—his face replaced by Gosar’s—attacking the evil, mindless “titans” that are ravaging human civilization, their faces replaced by Ocasio-Cortez’s and Biden’s. The video is interspersed with news footage of immigrants at the U.S. border and Border Patrol officers engaging in various enforcement activities.

Attack on Titan has become a favorite of the white-nationalist crowd because, in addition to its extreme violence, its extended storyline is an unmistakable metaphor for classic antisemitic conspiracy theories, with an elite cabal called the Marleyans overseeing the genocide of a persecuted race of humans called the Eldians. In the world of the alt-right, where anime is a predominant form of entertainment, the response has been unabashedly enthusiastic:

On 4chan, a website now nearly synonymous with the alt-right, the rabid message board /pol/ has archived 57 distinct threads with Attack on Titan in the subject line since 2016 alone. And this is hardly an exhaustive list of racist threads citing or discussing the show. In 2014, a user with a Nazi flag described the series as “one of the most redpilled shows I have seen in a long time,” while people down the list said it was an endorsement of “the revival of National Socialism.” A more recent post from 2019, titled “Redpilling Propaganda in the Form of Movies, TV Programs,” used season three of Attack on Titan as its case study.

Gosar’s digital director, Jessica Lycos, issued a statement that makes light of the video’s threatening content: “Everyone needs to relax,” she said. Similarly, Gosar’s Twitter account posted a meme with a crying “Soyjak” saying, “Your cartoon anime scares me with your jet flying and lightsabers,” to which a “Yes Chad” replies: “It’s a cartoon. Relax.”

Twitter chose not to remove the post, despite the clear violation of its terms of service. Instead, it limited the ability to retweet or reply to the post, while posting a warning on it: “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about hateful conduct. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”

However, Gosar’s Democratic colleagues weren’t buying the “it’s just a cartoon” excuse. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for an investigation into Gosar’s conduct: “Threats of violence against Members of Congress and the President of the United States must not be tolerated,” she tweeted. “@GOPLeader should join in condemning this horrific video and call on the Ethics Committee and law enforcement to investigate.”

“This is sick behavior from Rep Paul Gosar,” California Democrat Ted Lieu tweeted. “He tweeted out the video showing him killing Rep Ocasio-Cortez from both his official account and personal account. In any workplace in America, if a coworker made an anime video killing another coworker, that person would be fired.”

Ocasio-Cortez commented that “a creepy member I work with who fundraises for Neo-Nazi groups shared a fantasy video of him killing me and he’ll face no consequences [because] @GOPLeader cheers him on with excuses. Fun Monday! Well, back to work because institutions don’t protect [women of color].”

“Remember when [Florida Republican Ted Yoho] accosted me on the Capitol [steps] and called me a f—ing b—. Remember when Greene ran after me a few months ago screaming … Remember when she stalked my office the [first] time [with] insurrectionists and people locked inside. All at my job and nothing ever happens,” she added.

Minnesota Congressman Ilhan Omar tweeted: “This man should not serve in Congress. Fantasizing about violently attacking your colleagues has no place in our political discourse and society.”

Max Berger of More Perfect Union pointed out that Gosar was heavily involved in the runup to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection (and has been heavily promoting the conspiracy theory that the event was a “Deep State” operation ever since). “He’s still promoting violence against Democratic members of Congress,” he tweeted. “He should be expelled from Congress immediately.”

In an interview on The View Tuesday, Congressman Adam Schiff opined that Gosar “has no business being in Congress.” He noted that Republicans so far have been entirely mute about Gosar’s tweet, noting that some of them are reportedly lining up to reprimand their 13 GOP colleagues who voted for Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill.

“Gosar creates this video glorifying violence against one of our colleagues who’s already been the subject of death threats, and that’s perfectly OK,” he said. “They are repeatedly glorifying violence.”

Not to mention white-nationalist antisemitism.

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Adding to the already thick stack of subpoenas doled out by the Jan. 6 Committee as it continues its investigation into the attack on the U.S. Capitol, chair Bennie Thompson rolled out 10 more subpoenas Tuesday, including one for Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior advisor and White House stalwart instrumental in so much of the former president’s most virulent policies.

“The Select Committee wants to learn every detail of what went on in the White House on Jan. 6 and in the days beforehand. We need to know precisely what role the former president and his aides played in efforts to stop the counting of electoral votes and if they were in touch with anyone outside the White House attempting to overturn the outcome of the election,” Thompson said in a statement late Tuesday afternoon.  

The latest batch of subpoenas has been issued to players both large and small in the Trump administration. At the more senior level, in addition to Miller, congressional investigators have also demanded documents and depositions from former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and Vice President Mike Pence’s national security advisor, Keith Kellogg.

According to the committee, Miller is being subpoenaed because, based on his own public statements, he repeatedly spread bogus information about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election and set himself about the task of encouraging state legislators to alter the election’s outcome “by, among other things, appointing alternate slates of electors to send competing electoral votes to the United States Congress.”

Indeed, in December, Miller appeared on Fox & Friends saying: “The only date in the Constitution is Jan. 20, so we have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner of the election.”

Donald Trump did not win the election, but that did not deter Miller.

“As we speak, today, an alternate slate of electors in the contested states is going to vote and we’re going to send those results up to Congress. This will ensure that all of our legal remedies remain open. That means that if we win these cases in the courts, that we can direct the alternate slate of electors be certified.”

In reality, nothing in the Constitution or even in-state electoral processes permits an “alternate” slate of electors. And there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the election, per Trump’s very own Attorney General William Barr.

Miller also had a hand in crafting Trump’s remarks from the Ellipse on Jan. 6 and was at the White House during the siege, legislators note. Miller was with Trump, too, when the president delivered his inciteful speech that eventually descended into chaos that morning. Lawmakers have demanded Miller be deposed on Dec. 14.

Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who stood at the dais in the James Brady briefing room to deliver daily canned responses and admonish any press that would dare question the president or his policies, has also been slapped with a subpoena.

“In a press conference, after the election, you claimed that there are ‘very real claims’ of fraud that the Trump re-election campaign was pursuing and said that mail-in voting was one that ‘we have identified as being particularly prone to fraud,’” the subpoena to McEnany states.

Like Miller, McEnany was with Trump when he traveled to the Ellipse and spoke at the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally.

She also “popped out to join Mr. Trump as he watched the attack on the U.S. Capitol later that afternoon,” the committee said. McEnany’s deposition is slated for Dec. 3.

Keith Kellogg, Pence’s onetime national security adviser may also have credible evidence sought after by investigators. Lawmakers want records connected to a meeting Kellogg took with Trump and attorney Pat Cipollone during which Trump reportedly insisted that “Pence needed to send the votes back and not certify the election.”

“You were in the White House with former President Trump as the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol unfolded and have direct information about the former president’s statements about, and reactions to, the Capitol insurrection,” the committee emphasized.

Kellogg also allegedly met with Trump before the rally and then afterward where he “urged Mr. Trump to send out a tweet to his supporters at the U.S. Capitol to help control the crowd.”

This is the first time Kellogg has received a subpoena from congress as it relates to Trump. In 2019, during Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, Kellogg was revealed to be on the July 25 call Trump took with Ukraine President Volodomyr Zelensky when the commander-in-chief abused his power as he pursued political dirt on Joe Biden. Lawmakers never called Kellogg forward during that inquiry.

Kellogg is scheduled to be deposed on Dec. 1.

In addition to Miller, McEnany, and Kellogg, lawmakers also want to hear from John McEntee, the former body man turned White House Personnel director who, lawmakers contend, was in the Oval Office with Trump when Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, campaign counsel Justin Clark, and Pence discussed auditing the count in Georgia.

Investigators also believe McEntee listened in as Giuliani gamed out how to seize Dominion voting machines.

As the director of personnel, McEntee was privy to or involved directly in communications wherein officials were questioned about their loyalty to the president.

Further, investigators said, McEntee “specifically discouraged a number of individuals from seeking employment after the election, as it would appear to be a concession of President Trump’s defeat.”

Deposition for McEntee is slated for Dec. 15.

Benjamin Williamson, the former deputy assistant to Trump and senior adviser to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, is “in a position to potentially inform the Select Committee’s examination of Mr. Meadows’ efforts to communicate” with other officials, the subpoena states.

Williamson allegedly discussed already-dismissed voter fraud cases with officials in Georgia and during the attack on the Capitol, reportedly spoke to both White House communications director Alyssa Farah and Meadows. Farah urged the men that day to have Trump issue a statement both addressing the attack and condemning the violence.

Williamson is slated to appear for deposition by Dec. 2.

Other officials subpoenaed Tuesday include Nicholas Luna, Trump’s former personal assistant; Molly Michael, special assistant to the president and Oval Office operations coordinator; Christopher Liddell, former White House deputy chief of staff; Cassidy Hutchinson, special assistant to the president for legislative affairs and Kenneth Klukowski, former senior counsel to then-Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark. Clark has already been subpoenaed by the committee but has reportedly stonewalled members, citing claims of executive privilege.

Investigators say Luna was in the Oval Office with Trump on the morning of Jan. 6 and was listening in as Trump urged Pence not to certify the election results.

Michael, as a special assistant, was in regular contact with Trump and was “specifically involved in sending information about alleged election fraud to various individuals, apparently at the director of President Trump,” the committee asserts. 

In December, Michael forwarded an email to Jeffrey Rosen, then-acting attorney general, with the blaring subject line “From POTUS,” and attached to it talking points plus a “purported forensic report discussing unfounded voting irregularities in Antrim County, Michigan.”

Michael sent another email on Dec. 29 on Trump’s behalf to Justice Department officials, including the solicitor general, ultimately hankering to have the department file a lawsuit at the Supreme Court in hopes of overturning the election results.

Christopher Liddell’s testimony could prove useful to the committee: Not only was he in the White House on Jan. 6, he frequently communicated with Meadows.

Liddell, originally from New Zealand, told a reporter at the New Zealand-based news outlet Newsroom, that the events of Jan. 6 “horrified him” and he considered quitting but “after a great deal of persuasion,” Newsroom reported, he opted to stay.

As for Hutchinson, she accompanied Trump to the Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6, and prior to that, on Dec. 30, following Meadows’ trip to Georgia for an election audit, investigators allege Hutchinson reached out directly to Georgia’s deputy secretary Jordan Fuchs by email.

Hutchinson, like many of the other assistants to the president, is believed to have communicated directly with members of Women for America First, including its founder Amy Kremer. Kremer has already received a subpoena, but her deposition has been delayed for now.

Klukowski, Jeffrey Clark’s senior counsel, was engaged in attempts to “involve the Department of Justice” to get in on the alternate slate of electors scheme, the committee argues.

As of Tuesday, 35 subpoenas have been issued as lawmakers keep ramping up their probe. On Monday, the panel kicked off the week issuing six new demands, including one to John Eastman, author of the six-point memo instructing Pence how to deny Joe Biden’s win.

Meanwhile, Trump has appeared anxious to shroud hundreds of pages of records from the select committee. The judge handling his request, however, has so far appeared disinclined to go against President Joe Biden’s formal refusal to assert executive privilege over the records.

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Senate Republicans’ projection of confidence following last week’s elections isn’t exactly translating into improving prospects for next year’s midterms.

On Tuesday, New Hampshire’s very popular GOP governor, Chris Sununu, announced he would bypass a Senate bid to run for a fourth term in the Granite State.

Sununu had been considered the strongest possible contender to unseat first-term Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and his declination is a major blow to the GOP effort to retake the Senate majority next year.

In explaining his decision, Sununu also suggested joining the U.S. Senate was about as appealing as choking down a plate full of cold, soggy eggs every day for the foreseeable future.  

“I’d rather push myself 120 miles an hour delivering wins for New Hampshire than to slow down, end up on Capitol Hill, debating partisan politics without results,” Sununu said. “That’s why I’m going to run for a fourth term.”

Nothing sums up Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s GOP caucus better than “partisan politics without results.” Even better, Sununu forgot to inform McConnell and Senate GOP campaign chief Rick Scott of his decision before going public with it.”I guess you’ll have to let them know. I haven’t talked to them,” Sununu told reporters. Ouch.

But Sununu wasn’t alone in his grim assessment of joining Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill. Shortly after Sununu gave McConnell the heave-ho, former Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who narrowly lost her seat to Hassan in 2016, also appeared to be taking a pass on the prospect of taking orders from McConnell in the Senate. Sources close to Ayotte told WMUR the former senator would not be running.

Senate Republicans’ chances of picking up a seat in New Hampshire just got significantly downgraded. But the rejection from both Sununu and Ayotte represents something much bigger that just one seat: It’s a collapsing of the Senate GOP’s establishment wing.

McConnell is looking weaker than ever. His recent endorsement of alleged wife abuser Herschel Walker for the Georgia Senate seat laid bare how truly desperate and subservient to Donald Trump he is. No sane-ish Republican wants to join McConnell’s do-nothing caucus so they can twiddle their thumbs for two years in hopes that they will become Trump’s chattel in 2024.

Back in Kentucky, McConnell put on a brave face, telling reporters, “I think the wind is going to be at our backs in both the House and Senate.” He also reiterated for the umpteenth time that the 2022 midterms “will be about the future, not about the past.” Republicans just keep saying that as if they will be able to wipe away the stain of Trump’s ceaseless grousing about the supposedly “stolen” 2020 election.

But Sununu and Ayotte know that past is prologue. McConnell’s standard of governing—whether he’s in the minority or the majority—is to impede progress and get as little done as possible. They also know that McConnell has surrendered the party to Trump, and that will continue to be true no matter who wins the Senate next year.