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In a move that deprives Senate Republican leaders of one of their most sought-after recruits, Republican Chris Sununu announced Tuesday that he would seek a fourth two-year term as governor of New Hampshire rather than challenge Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan next year. Speculation immediately swirled that former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who lost an extremely tight 2016 race to Hassan, would be the Senate GOP’s backup choice, but unnamed sources close to Ayotte soon told WMUR’s John DiStaso that she “​​will NOT be a candidate for any office in 2022.”  

We’re not sure if Ayotte tipped off Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell or NRSC Chair Rick Scott about her reported decision to sit out the race, but according to Sununu, they learned about his plans at the same time as the rest of us: The governor revealed he didn’t give any advance notice to McConnell or Scott, saying, “I guess you’ll have to let them know. I haven’t talked to them.”

They sure know now (with McConnell adviser Josh Holmes responding to the Sununu news by tweeting, “Unbelievable”), and it will be up to Team Red to find a new candidate to take on Hassan. However, while the senator will avoid going up against Sununu—who won reelection 65-33 even as Joe Biden was taking New Hampshire 53-45—she’ll still be a top GOP target in a state that can swing wildly from cycle to cycle. There are plenty of Granite State politicians who may now take a look, including some politicians who may have campaigned for governor if he’d decided to take on Hassan.

The only notable Republican currently running for Senate is retired Army Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who got into the race a year ago at a time when Sununu all but froze the party’s field, but he’s unlikely to scare anyone off: Bolduc lost the 2020 primary for the Granite State’s other Senate seat 50-42, and he ended September with a mere $58,000 in the bank.

One person who seems uninterested, though, is Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator who moved north to unsuccessfully run for the Senate in 2014. Brown said he was focused on helping his wife, ​​Gail Huff Brown, win the 1st Congressional District, and said of another Senate run, “I don’t think so unless something traumatic happens.” (We have no idea what Brown considers “traumatic” for this race.)

Sununu, for his part, will likely be the clear favorite to win a fourth term as governor. A recent Saint Anselm College poll gave him a 56-42 job approval, which, while considerably smaller than his 64-34 score back in August, still puts him well above water. No notable Democrats have launched a campaign for governor yet, though it’s unlikely Team Blue will give him a free pass, especially if more polls show his numbers in decline.

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Representative Paul Gosar’s tweet of an anime video in which the Arizona Republican is shown killing fellow member Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and swinging swords at President Joe Biden has triggered waves of outrage in Washington and calls from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to investigate the legislator’s conduct.

In a statement Tuesday, Pelosi, a California Democrat, condemned Gosar, saying, “Threats of violence against Members of Congress and the President of the United States must not be tolerated.”

Pelosi also called on Kevin McCarthy, the GOP leader in the House of Representatives, to condemn the “horrific video” publicly and call on the House Ethics Committee, as well as law enforcement, to investigate.

A spokeswoman for McCarthy did not immediately return a request for comment.

Gosar, on the other hand, appeared nonchalant on the matter.

“I will always fight for the rule of law, securing our borders and defending the America First agenda,” Gosar told Reuters. Gosar did not immediately respond to the request for comment by Daily Kos.

The violent animation shared by Gosar has triggered waves of outrage from several Democrats including Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island and Rep. Judy Chu of California.

“This is absolutely sick and certainly meets the threshold for his accounts to be suspended,” Cicilline said in reaction to Gosar’s post.

Cicilline introduced a resolution in the House this May calling for censuring members who would not refer to Jan. 6 as an insurrection and singled out Gosar in particular.

Rep. Judy Chu, a California Democrat, in a statement on Twitter put a finer point on the situation Tuesday.

“I won’t share his disgusting video, but since being in Congress, I have seen two colleagues—Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise—shot. And I have seen a racist mob come for us all with nooses and knives. Paul Gosar should be ashamed, but lacking that, @GOPLeader [McCarthy] must speak out,” Chu wrote.

It is unlikely that a bid for censure would garner the votes necessary to pass the House given McCarthy’s stranglehold over members of the GOP but the pressure is mounting nonetheless. 

Jennifer Gosar, the Arizona Republican’s sister, appeared on MSNBC to decry her brother’s behavior and demanded Pelosi, McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, or even Attorney General Merrick Garland to do something more to address the lawmaker’s conduct.

“Where are these people? Does he need to act on his sociopathic fantasy for Representative [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez? I’m very concerned,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez lamented Gosar’s behavior late Monday, calling the Republican a “creepy member… who fundraises for Neo-Nazi groups.”

“And he’ll face no consequences because @GOPLeader cheers him on with excuses,” the New York Democrat tweeted Monday. “Fun Monday! Well, back to work because institutions don’t protect woc [women of color].”

Last July, Ocasio-Cortez was accosted by Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida, calling her a “fucking bitch” and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, also verbally attacked the New York Democrat.  

“Remember when she stalked my office the first time with insurrectionists and people locked inside. All at my job and nothing ever happens,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

She continued and said of Gosar: “This dude is just a collection of wet toothpicks anyway. White Supremacy is for extremely fragile people and sad men like him, whose self-concept relies on the myth that he was born superior because deep down he knows he couldn’t open a pickle jar or read a whole book by himself.”

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As usual, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz apparently doesn’t see racism, understand systemic racism, or (the most likely) chooses to ignore the realities of racism in this country. 

During a White House press conference Monday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was fielding questions about the infrastructure bill when April D. Ryan, a White House correspondent for theGrio, asked:

“And also, can you give us the construct of how you will deconstruct the racism that was built into the roadways,” she asked Buttigieg, referring to an article on theGrio. “Can you talk to us about how that could be deconstructed?

“I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a white and a black neighborhood, or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach — or that would have been — in New York was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices,” Buttigieg responded.

“I don’t think we have anything to lose by confronting that simple reality,” he added.  “And I think we have everything to gain by acknowledging it and then dealing with it, which is why the Reconnecting Communities — that billion dollars — is something we want to get to work right away putting to work.”

Well, Cruz was surprised. His tighty-whities went into a squeezed bunch because he went right over to Twitter to lodge his Brandon complaint. 

This simpleton boiled all of what Buttigieg—an Oxford grad and Rhodes Scholar who speaks half a dozen languages—said into two imbecilic sentences. 

“The roads are racist. We must get rid of roads.” 

“You see, we Hispanics are very, very tall, and we need rich, woke Dems to raise the bridges for us,” Cruz said in a follow-up tweet. “Without Pete’s condescending help, there’s no way we can get to the beach.”

Senator, the bipartisan infrastructure bill isn’t just about repairing roads and bridges, it also has earmarked $20 billion to fix Black and brown communities bruised and beaten by previous infrastructure projects—think poison-filled pipes in Flint, Michigan, and lack of WiFi and affordable housing. 

“I think that the conversation we’re having now about race, inequality, and infrastructure at this level is new, and to me that’s encouraging,” Eric Avila, an urban cultural historian and professor at UCLA, told PBS.

Perhaps Cruz has conveniently forgotten about the fact that often when highways are built in this country, they tear through communities of color to make way for construction.

Popularly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 established an interstate highway system in the U.S. that spanned 40,000 miles across the country from east to west. 

According to PBS, in a 2016 speech at the Center for American Progress, then-Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the first two decades of the federal interstate system displaced 475,000 families and more than 1 million people.

“The interstate highway system did not cause all the problems facing urban communities,” Archer wrote. “However, its construction compounded discrimination and exploitation and triggered a process that weakened urban neighborhoods, from which they have never fully recovered,” New York University law professor Deborah Archer told PBS.

The Reconnecting Communities Act will address the “legacy of highway construction built through communities, especially through low-income communities and communities of color, that divided neighborhoods and erected barriers to mobility and opportunity,” a statement from Sen. Tom Carter reads. Carter is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. 

The statement adds: “This legislation will support local efforts to reconnect and revitalize areas that were harmed by the construction of the interstate highway system.”

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The 1999 Columbine High School mass shooting posed a challenge for the National Rifle Association (NRA). The nation was not yet accustomed to mass shootings in schools, and the NRA had to decide how to respond to public horror. Now NPR has obtained two and a half hours of recordings of internal NRA deliberations on how to proceed, deliberations that laid the groundwork for how the NRA would respond to every mass shooting since then.

The NRA’s national convention was scheduled for just days after Columbine, and it was close by in Denver. The group’s leaders debated cancelling it, but ultimately went ahead, albeit with a scaled-down event. One exchange quoted by NPR lays out the core of the debate.

NRA official Jim Land: “I got to tell you, we got to think this thing through, because if we tuck tail and run, we’re going to be accepting responsibility for what happened out there.”

PR Consultant Tony Makris: “That’s one very good argument, Jim. On the other side, if you don’t appear to be deferential in honoring the dead, you end up being a tremendous s***head who wouldn’t tuck tail and run, you know? So it’s a double-edged sword.”

The NRA, of course, went with tremendous s***head, and has been doubling down on that position for 22 years.

The recordings make clear that it was the NRA calling the shots. The gun industry was not pressuring the organization one way or the other. In fact, the head of an industry trade group had “said they stand ready to help us orchestrate whatever we want to do. They’re just waiting to know.” Then-Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles, an Oklahoma Republican, wanted the NRA to “secretly provide them with talking points.” It was up to the NRA to decide what direction the gun lobby and the Republican Party would go following a deadly school shooting.

Privately, the NRA’s leaders acknowledged how very bad Columbine looked for the organization, and how bad its annual convention, with the attendant gun show, would look. “Don’t anybody kid yourself about this great macho thing of going down there and showing our chest and showing how damn tough we are … We are in deep s*** on this deal … And so anything we do here is going to be a matter of trying to decide the best of a whole bunch of very, very bad choices,” said one. 

”At that same period where they’re going to be burying these children, we’re going to be having media … trying to run through the exhibit hall, looking at kids fondling firearms, which is going to be a horrible, horrible, horrible juxtaposition,” said another. But the exhibit hall was important to draw in people outside of the NRA’s most committed members, a third person said, because, “If you pull down the exhibit hall, that’s not going to leave anything for the media except the members meeting, and you’re going to have the wackos … with all kinds of crazy resolutions, with all kinds of, of dressing like a bunch of hillbillies and idiots. And, and it’s gonna, it’s gonna be the worst thing you can imagine.”

At that convention, the NRA laid the course it has followed ever since following mass shootings: Attack the media and insist that it’s disrespectful to the people murdered by guns to discuss the role of guns in their murders.

“Why us? Because their story needs a villain. They want us to play the heavy in their drama of packaged grief, to provide riveting programming to run between commercials for cars and cat food,” then-NRA President Charlton Heston said of the media. “The dirty secret of this day and age is that political gain and media ratings all too often bloom on fresh graves.”

And because the NRA was committed to ensuring that there would be lots of fresh graves for decades to come, that message has gotten a regular workout. But back then in 1999, with 13 dead at Columbine, they knew just how bad it looked for them, and how important it was to get the right message to get people to look past the gun lobby’s role in that mass killing.

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A year after the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) ended a surveillance program it used for years to predict where crimes might be committed before they happened, the department is using a similar program. Critics say it’s turning out to be yet another gift-wrapped pile of feces stinking up communities of color. Police Chief Michel Moore cited financial constraints the coronavirus pandemic prompted when he announced the department’s decision to end its predictive policing program, Pred-Pol, last April. He has said a year before the decision to cut Pred-Pol that he disagrees with critics who said the program enables racial profiling. “The manner of how we use data is informed by the evolution of technology,” Moore told the Los Angeles Times in October 2019. “We’re going to smartly use our precious resources.”

The next year, he was announcing the “hard decision” to rethink the strategy, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Problem is Moore, a white man, has his eye on the wrong problem. “Rather than re-evaluating their whole business model, they’re just trying to reframe the value of the product,” Albert Fox Cahn, the founder of the anti-surveillance advocacy group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told The Guardian. “They’re saying: here’s how you can prevent crime by allocating officers and changing patrols and changing who you engage with. And that’s going to result in the exact same outcomes.”

Public documents included in a recent report by the community organization Stop LAPD Spying explain how Pred-Pol and Operation LASER, which the LAPD used chiefly in its predictive policing program, supported long-existing patterns of racial profiling and overpolicing in Black and brown communities. LASER—which stood for Los Angeles’ Strategic Extraction and Restoration—was launched in 2011 to determine exact locations connected to gun and gang violence, the Los Angeles Times reported. It took police some eight years to realize the program wasn’t accomplishing what it promised, with questions raised about how effective the program was as a data-driven strategy relying on algorithms.

“We discontinued LASER because we want to reassess the data,” Josh Rubenstein, the LAPD’s chief spokesman, told the Times in April of 2019. “It was inconsistent. We’re pulling back.”

A month before that revelation, police were targeting a corner in a Black community that Ermias Asghedom, the late rapper who went by Nipsey Hussle, was working to attract Black-owned investment to. He bought the Marathon Clothing Store at Slauson Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard in 2017 and was ultimately shot and killed in front of the store on March 31, 2019 allegedly by a former friend of his.

“Unknown to the community was that the intersection of Slauson and Crenshaw had been marked a LASER Anchor Point since at least 2016 and was part of a larger LASER Zone since 2015,” authors of the Stop LAPD Spying report wrote in a summary. “A Palantir mission sheet for the intersection from 2017 shows a single patrol car making 103 stops and 3 arrests in a 7-day timespan. The mission sheet directed police to look for a robbery ‘suspect’ described simply as a 16 to 18 year old Black male ‒ not at all descriptive but apparently enough to justify 103 stops.

“Another mission sheet for the 7 days prior shows 58 stops and 7 arrests, all apparently looking for the same 16 to 18 year old Black male ‘suspect.’”

(And yes, that’s the same Palantir software company that works with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to identify immigrants to be deported through data mining.)

Nipsey was being investigated by LAPD based on officers’ claim that his store was a front for “gang activity,” according to the report. City Attorney Mike Feuer had “harassed Nipsey for years based on a ‘maniacal zeal to expel the Marathon Store from Slauson Plaza,’” authors of the report wrote. “At the same time LAPD was working to criminalize the area and the City Attorney was working to expel Nipsey, mega-developers and real estate speculators with close relationships to LAPD were competing against Nipsey and other local Black investors to acquire land and wealth in the area.”

Stop LAPD Spying listed the commercial real estate firm CIM Group and the investment firm Goldman Sachs as two of those companies. “CIM has long collaborated with police on displacement,” authors of the report wrote. “A CIM Group principal with close ties to LAPD also served as president of the Hollywood Property Owners’ Alliance (HPOA), which manages two BIDs (Business Improvement Districts).

“Since November 2014, HPOA paid for an upgrade to LAPDʼs network of wireless surveillance cameras with monitors in the Hollywood Station. CIM also donated rent to LAPD from 2008 to 2018 for the establishment of a substation and ‘logistical base’ at a CIM-owned shopping mall.”

Goldman Sachs helps LAPD access new technologies and resources “without public scrutiny through the Los Angeles Police Foundation,” and in 2019, the company anonymously donated $250,000 through the foundation to fund a “community policing” program in Harvard Park, which is an Opportunity Zone giving investors tax breaks, Stop LAPD Spying wrote.

The group added:

“CSP sites also have been testing grounds for LAPD surveillance, for example with wireless cameras streaming live video to local cop cars at the Jordan Downs public housing complex. Within days of the Opportunity Zone announcement, Goldman Sachs moved fast to pursue these taxbreaks and claimed it would ‘voluntarily measure the outcomes of its projects’ to ‘align their goals with community priorities.’ So not only would the firm exercise massive power to gentrify neighborhoods, it would also assume the role of measuring and translating the communityʼs priorities.

What is starkly clear from these relationships is that while Black residents of South Central were forced to navigate threats of police violence and banishment, outside investors and developers collaborated with LAPD on displacement, even donating salaries, weapons, surveillance equipment, and real estate for police officers deployed in the communities.”

Just because Pred-Pol and Operation LASER are out doesn’t mean the larger inner workings of the policing and tech partnerships harming people of color have halted. Another initiative simply replaced them, The Guardian reported. It uses the acronym DICFP, which stands for Data Informed Community Focused Policing, and the department wrote last year in a brochure for the program that its mission was “to safeguard the lives and property of the people we serve, to reduce the incidence and fear of crime, and to enhance public safety while working with our diverse communities to improve their quality of life.”

Moore wrote in the brochure that “policing strategies that focus solely on proactive suppression may reduce crime, but often leave neighborhoods feeling over-policed, singled out, and unnerved.” He also contended that the “legitimacy of a police department is dependent on a community’s trust in its police officers.”

In its description of DICFP, the department, however, detailed the same strategies that LASER used, compounding distrust in Black and brown communities. “Martin Luther King Jr Park in south-west LA – which documents show was an anchor point in 2016 and 2018 – was also identified as a neighborhood engagement area in March 2020 because the parking lot next to it was ‘where gang members are loitering,’” Guardian writer Johana Bhuiyan wrote. “A section in one of the documents that asks for a description of the ‘crime trend, activity, or quality of life issues’ describes complaints of ‘tailgating activities with barbecue grills and alcohol’ as well as overnight parking and encampments. In order to prevent future crime, the document notes, police did sweeps of the park, cited vehicles and dispatched additional gang units and patrols.

”Where the document asks the officer to indicate which of the three goals of DICFP the project accomplished, nothing is circled.”

LAPD officials have not replied to The Guardian‘s repeated requests for comment.

Shakeer Rahman, a community organizer with Stop LAPD Spying, told the British news website data-driven software helps automate already prevalent police logic. “That includes targeting poor people, targeting unhoused people, targeting Black, brown and disabled people,” Rahman said. “This is now helping to automate those practices and automate the harm, automate the banishment, automate the displacement that policing has always been responsible for.”

RELATED: ‘Gee, that’s suspicious—Black people shopping in Beverly Hills,’ attorney mocks police force

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“I hope you die. I hope everybody in your fucking family dies.” That’s the voicemail Rep. Fred Upton, Republican from Michigan, found after he cast a vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill last Friday. The caller called him a “fucking piece of shit traitor.” Upton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he’s gotten other calls, and it’s like the others in that group of 13 have as well, because they’ve been targeted after poster child for deplorables Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia tweeted out the names and phone numbers of the 13 “traitors.”

The Marjorie Taylor Greene wing of the caucus attacked immediately after the vote. “I can’t believe Republicans just gave the Democrats their socialism bill,” Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida said. “That 13 House Republicans provided the votes needed to pass this is absurd,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas said. “Vote for this infrastructure bill and I will primary the hell out of you,” Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina warned just before the vote.

The Marjorie Taylor Greenes among the House Republicans aren’t just siccing their violent followers against the 13, they’re lobbying leadership to strip the 13 of the committee assignments. “Several of these lawmakers,” Punchbowl News reports, “are also ranking members—top Republicans on committees—and those could be at risk, too.”

Meanwhile, there’s a guy who really should be not just stripped of committee assignments, but expelled. Rep. Paul Gosar—the Arizona dentist who is so awful his six siblings have appeared in ads begging the voters to reject him—is making videos of his violent homicidal fantasies against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden and tweeting them out.

That’s got regular people outraged—regular people meaning Democrats in the House who treat death threats as serious problems and not just how we express political views.

Now that’s someone who should be expelled. As of now, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy hasn’t said a thing about Gosar, or the 13 “traitors” the deplorable crowd is trying to get kicked out, if not killed.

Upton is worried. He told Cooper, “I’ll tell you it’s a terrible way—we have seen civility really downslide here. I’m concerned about my staff. They are taking these calls.”

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On Monday afternoon, the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 issued a new round of subpoenas. Included in the net this time were:

• Trump Campaign Manager Bill Stepien, best known for his involvement in Chris Christie’s “Bridgegate” scandal, and for not having bothered to vote in 2016.
• Former Trump adviser Jason Miller, who founded a right-wing alternative to Twitter but couldn’t get Trump to use it, and left a spot at CNN after he was accused of slipping his pregnant mistress an abortion pill.
• Trump’ executive assistant for the campaign, Angela McCallum, who served as the “war room” chief for the two failed GOP Senate candidates in Georgia and who made some very suspect calls to Michigan.
• Disgraced former General Michael Flynn, best known for being an absurd jackass pardoned by Trump after lying to the FBI, and for his ongoing tour in which he cheers on violence and conspiracy theories alongside MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
• Former Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, who was facing four felony counts of tax fraud and lying to officials until Trump commuted his sentence, and who used his 9/11 fame to enrich himself through corruption.
• Attorney John Eastman, best known for personally authoring a plan to take down the United States government, for pressuring Mike Pence to adopt that plan in the midst of the assault on the Capitol, and for somehow not being under arrest for sedition.

Which seems like a good lineup of people who should have interesting stories to tell about their involvement in everything from the planning of the insurgency in the weeks following the election to the events on the day of the attack.

But the real question is: Will any of these six ever be compelled to provide meaningful testimony? And based on what’s been seen so far with Steve Bannon, that answer seems clear.

All six of those facing new subpoenas have connections to the way in which Trump refused to accept the outcome of the election and created the conditions leading to insurgency. That includes Flynn, who headlined “Stop the Steal” rallies in the weeks after Election Day; Stepien, who worked with the organizers of those rallies to coordinate the message of the Big Lie; Kerik and Miller, who were both part of the Jan. 5 meeting with Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon at which the events of the following day were planned; McCallum, who reportedly got hands-on in trying to get Michigan state representatives to throw out the votes and appoint Trump electors; and Eastman … who should simply be in jail.

But the name that hangs over all six of the newly subpoenaed crew is Bannon. The Select Committee issued its first round of subpoenas back on Sept. 24. After a month of refusals, the committee moved to hold Bannon in contempt on Oct. 20. The full House then voted to send the finding to the Department of Justice on Oct. 21. Then the Department of Justice … has done nothing.  

It’s been three weeks since that citation landed in U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s lap, and since then the attorney general hasn’t provided so much as a signal on how, or when, he intends to respond. It’s not as if the contempt of Congress citation against Bannon came as a surprise. Every step of the event—from the subpoena, to letters with Bannon’s attorneys, to the committee vote, to the House vote—all played out in public. In fact, it was clear that the select committee would be sending such contempt charges over to the Department of Justice well before the whole process with Bannon began.

Garland had all the time in the world to work through any concerns about how he would deal with these citations before the first one arrived. So why didn’t he? Why wasn’t the Department of Justice ready with a response—yea or nay—on the day, the hour, that Bannon’s contempt citation came their way?

There is no good reason.

What there is, is a deadline. In 14 months, a new Congress will sit down in D.C. If that election were held today, there’s very little doubt it would hand the Republicans a majority in the House. Over the next year, should Democrats get their act together and pass Build Back Better, and should someone in the press point out that child care credits more than offset imaginary increases in the cost of milk, there is a chance that the polls will flip. No one should be taking that chance.

The end of 2022 may not be the end of any opportunity to hold those involved in planning and executing the insurrection responsible, but it should absolutely be treated as a hard deadline. 

That’s not just the point by which the committee must obtain meaningful testimony. By that point, it has to analyze that testimony, finalize its findings, and send Congress, the president, and the Department of Justice any recommendations for further action.

What’s happening with Bannon doesn’t make that seem likely. Neither does what’s happening with former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, or former Pentagon  Chief of Staff (and Devin Nunes aide) Kash Patel. All of them got subpoenas at the same time as Bannon, and they’ve not even begun to be moved through the pipeline toward contempt.

It’s not just Garland’s silence on Bannon’s contempt citation that seems to doom the idea of getting anything done on time, it’s the experience of the last five years. Consider the earlier case of Michael Flynn, who agreed to cooperate with the investigation into Trump: Russia in December 2017, saw multiple extensions in 2018 and 2019, reversed his plea in January 2020, was recommended for six months in prison by federal prosecutors a few weeks later, saw his case withdrawn and reinstated in May, and was ultimately pardoned by Trump in November 2020.

Or take the efforts to obtain Donald Trump’s tax records, which are absolutely available to Congress in clear terms spelled out in law.

On April 3, 2019 House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig requesting six years of Trump’s business and personal returns. That should have been the end of it. Instead, the IRS simply ignored that letter. The House subpoenaed the returns in May 2019. The case went to District Court in July with the Department of Justice acting to protect Trump. After a month of inaction, the House requested a summary judgement. The judge refused and instead asked for “a briefing by both parties” to be held by Sept. 30. The judge then “urged the parties to work out a compromise” and issued a stay over the House attempt to get the documents. The Ways and Means Committee issued a new request in July 2021, the Justice Department joined the suit this time, ordering the IRS to turn over the documents on July 30. Trump sued to block the action, but on on Aug. 11, 2021 a federal district judge ruled that the committee can get access to some of the documents. Trump appealed. On Oct. 27, Trump’s attorneys were back in front of a federal judge to block the Treasury Department and the IRS from giving his tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee.

The law entitling the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee to Trump’s tax returns is absolutely clear, but over two and half years after requesting those documents, the committee does not have Trump’s returns.

Trump didn’t learn these skills in the White House. He—like a lot of wealthy people—learned them by successfully using the courts to block collection of legitimate debts, persecute those who tried to point out his crimes, and harass people for sport in literally thousands upon thousands of cases. He knows that with sufficient money and a willing attorney, there is always another way to challenge a ruling. The whole of the judicial branch is a mechanism absolutely rife with opportunity for delay and distraction for those with the resources to exploit its weaknesses. 

It is a real question as to whether it is possible to protect the United States government from attempted overthrow, with actions carried out through the United States legal system—especially when the efforts to overthrow that government enjoy the support and resources of one of the two major parties.

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Donald Trump may be on his own planet in terms of understanding what is legal or constitutional in the United States, but Judge Tanya Chutkan brought him down to earth late Monday night after promptly rejecting the former president’s last-minute bid to keep records sought by the Jan. 6th Committee shrouded.

Trump sued the committee as well as the National Archives in October following an earlier subpoena from congressional investigators demanding a litany of records related to Trump’s activities before, during and after the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Though Trump cited executive privilege over the records, President Joe Biden stepped in and with a letter from White House Counsel Dana Remus, declined to honor the claim and cited instead the “extraordinary circumstances” involved in examining “an assault on the Constitution and democratic institutions provoked and fanned by those sworn to protect them.”

The National Archives has indicated the twice-impeached, single term president is trying to block roughly 750 pages of some 1,500 pages already collected by the archives at the committee’s behest. National Archivist David Ferriero agreed to turn over any documents amassed no later than this Friday, Nov. 12, barring an intervention by the court.

But with the clock running down and this week already interrupted by a federal holiday that shutters the court— Veteran’s Day—Trump just before midnight on Monday filed the urgent relief request asking Chutkan to not only block the committee from receiving the records as “novel constitutional and statutory issues” are considered but further and bizarrely, to approve an “administrative stay” of her ruling before she even issued it.

Trump’s attorney Jesse Binnall then doubled down in the request writing to Chutkan: “Should this court refuse President Trump’s injunction, he will promptly seek appellate relief.”

While Trump’s team was sweating the deadline, Chutkan was apparently burning the midnight oil and responded to the request in short order, calling it “premature” and against rules for relief which, she said, “plainly requires an interlocutory order or final judgment before considering such motions.”

The court, she added, intends to rule “expeditiously” on the matter.

The late-night development was first reported by Politico.

According to court records, among the hundreds of pages sought after by the committee, Trump is trying to hide dozens of pages of daily presidential diaries, schedules, appointment information showing visitors to the White House activity logs, call logs and switchboard shift-change checklists showing calls to himself and former Vice President Mike Pence. Drafts of speeches, remarks and correspondence concerning the events of Jan. 6 and at least three handwritten notes related to Jan. 6 from former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows files are also on Trump’s list of “to-block” documents.

Trump is trying to shield talking points housed in White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s binder related to allegations of voter fraud, election security and the 2020 election as well and he seeks to hide a draft of a “presidential speech for the Save America March” on Jan. 6.

Trump has also claimed privilege over a draft executive order “concerning election integrity and a draft proclamation honoring U.S. Capitol Police officers Brian Sicknick and Howard Liebengood. Sicknick died after sustaining injuries during the melee at the Capitol. The longtime officer, according to D.C. Chief Medical Examiner Francisco Diaz, endured two strokes about eight hours after being repeatedly sprayed with a chemical irritant during the assault. Though Sicknick’s death was listed as natural causes, U.S. Capitol Police said in a statement this April he “This does not change the fact Officer Sicknick died in the line of duty, courageously defending Congress and the Capitol.”

Liebengood, a 15-year veteran of the force, took his own life just a few days after the siege.

Trump also seeks to block emails from the Office of the Executive Clerk related to the committee’s interest in the White House’s response to the Capitol attack. That office specifically handles all legal documents signed by a president that comprise that president’s official acts and duties, including things like vetoes, public laws, pardons and certificates. It also is the entity responsible for transmitting messages from the president to Congress.

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A new book by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl includes an anecdote in which, hours before Donald Trump left office in January, he threatened to quit the Republican Party.

“I’m done,” Trump told RNC chair Ronna McDaniel. “I’m starting my own party.”

“You cannot do that,” McDaniel pleaded with Trump. “If you do, we will lose forever.”

“Exactly. You lose forever without me,” Trump responded. “I don’t care.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen reporting that Trump threatened to leave the party and start a so-called “Patriot Party.”

Earlier this year, The Washington Post reported that Trump had been telling associates he was holding the prospect of a third party over the heads of GOP lawmakers so they wouldn’t vote to convict him in the February impeachment trial.

Trump later dismissed the third-party threat as “fake news.”

Where the truth lies with anything involving Trump is always murky, but whether or not Trump actually articulated such a threat is kind of beside the point. In fact, ever since the closing of a very brief window following Jan. 6, GOP leaders have been acting like hostages in a hostage situation, as the Post‘s Aaron Blake points out.

That’s not to say that plenty of congressional Republicans and leaders at the state and local levels have been forced into anything. Many of them have been absolutely relishing living the MAGA dream.

But for GOP congressional leaders like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, the third-party threat is among the most plausible reasons for their quick evolution from tepid criticism of Trump to absolute fealty.

For McCarthy, that transformation included a blip on Jan. 13 in which he admitted Trump “bears responsibility” for the Capitol attack to suddenly jetting down to Mar-a-Lago on Jan. 28 for a makeup photo.

McConnell’s evolution included declaring on Jan. 13 “there’s no question” that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for provoking the Capitol attack, and then failing to corral the votes in his caucus to convict Trump and permanently kill his ongoing presidential aspirations. Ultimately, McConnell even found his own way to a “no” vote on conviction through the intellectual loophole of claiming it was improper to convict a president who wasn’t still in office. Of course, McConnell also refused to take up the proceeding while he was still majority leader, thereby stalling the trial until after Trump left office.

For congressional Republicans, the specter of Trump quitting the GOP and taking a healthy slice of the base with him would have sent shivers down their spine. Sure, they could rebuild, but it would take at least several election cycles along with some inspired thinking. The notion of inspired thinking alone might have kept McCarthy up at night, likely even moreso than gifting the party to Trump. McCarthy doesn’t care how he becomes speaker of the House or even whether he’s just an ornamental mouthpiece for Trump—he wants the speakership at any price.

McConnell, on the other hand, wants real power and likes to be the master of his own design—he simply miscalculated and misplayed his hand. As McConnell said himself, he thought Trump was a “fading brand” and the energy of the party was moving back toward the establishment. McConnell seemed to believe he was finally in a position to enjoy the upside of Trump without the equal and opposite downward pull toward the gutter.

He was horribly mistaken. The GOP lawmaker who got it right was Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of 10 House Republicans who joined Democrats in voting to impeach Trump. Cheney made the opposite calculation of McConnell—Trump’s election lies were a “continuing danger to our system” and risking her leadership post was worth making the point. Because as long as Trump remained a viable political force, he stood capable of bringing everyone down, including the republic.

On Jan. 6, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois was holed up for hours in a secure location with McConnell and other Democratic leaders as they watched scenes of the siege play out on TV. McConnell “reacted with anger and revulsion” at what was transpiring, and Durbin wondered if it might be a “transformative moment,” according to the Post.

Not so much. Now Durbin believes McConnell knows he missed his chance.

“Now he’s looking at Trump, not in the rearview mirror, but looking through the windshield and realizing he’s going to have to live with this man in the Republican Party for the foreseeable future,” Durbin told the Post‘s Michael Kranish.

Indeed, Trump so dominates the GOP now that he no longer has to threaten a third-party defection. Now Trump can simply threaten to tell his believers to stay home—as he did several weeks ago—and congressional Republicans shudder.

As the Kranish points out: “Mitch McConnell spent decades chasing power. Now he heeds Trump, who mocks him and wants him gone.”

Perhaps some Washington reporters are finally starting to catch on: Masterful McConnell isn’t as masterful as they once imagined.

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Former President Barack Obama delivered a moving speech during day nine of COP26 that took his successor to task and urged collaboration between individuals and nations in order to continue fighting climate change for the long haul regardless of political affiliation or motivation. While many outlets chose to focus on Obama’s soundbite-worthy call for young folks to “stay angry” and let that frustration motivate them, his speech on Monday was less about righteous fury and more about the urgent action this crisis requires.

Obama acknowledged some of his and his party’s own shortcomings while also noting how the Biden administration is stymied by similar problems. “I am convinced that President Biden’s Build Back Better bill will be historic and a huge plus for U.S. action on climate change. But keep in mind, Joe Biden wanted to do even more. He’s constrained by the absence of a robust majority that’s needed to make that happen,” Obama said. “Both of us have been constrained in large part by the fact that one of our two major parties has decided not only to sit on the sidelines, but express active hostility toward climate science and make climate change a partisan issue.”

The House is expected to tack up the Build Back Better Act next week. Obama made it clear that “saving the planet isn’t a partisan issue,” however, and urged Republicans to take climate change seriously. That notion extends to countries that may not be making as much progress as the world hoped for when 175 signees first adopted the Paris Accord in 2015. That number is now closer to 200 but many countries—the U.S. included—failed to meet many of the goals highlighted in that framework.

“Paris showed the world that progress is possible, created a framework, important work was done there, and important work has been done here. That is the good news,” Obama said. “Now for the bad news: We are nowhere near where we need to be yet… The consequences of not moving fast enough are becoming more apparent all the time. Last month, a study found that 85% of the global population has experienced weather events that were more severe because of climate change.”

Obama admitted that the U.S. did itself and the planet no favors by leaving the Paris Accord during the Trump administration but praised the companies that “chose to stay the course” and prioritize reducing emissions. Still, more must be done, especially when it comes to investing in a net-zero future. This is where the Build Back Better Act plays a key role, as even at its most stripped-down, it allows for historic investments in climate action. Ahead of the House vote, call on lawmakers to pass BBB. The U.S.—and the world—simply cannot wait.