Mehmet Oz (R) “spent months in a Pennsylvania Senate race touting a history of hunting in Florida. But the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has confirmed Oz never had a license to legally hunt in the Sunshine State,” Florida Politics reports.
“The vast majority of property Oz owns in the state of Florida remains unsuitable for hunting.”
“Late on a Friday night about six weeks after Donald Trump lost his reelection, a fistfight nearly broke out in the White House between the president’s fired national security adviser and a top White House aide,” the Washington Post reports.
“A motley crew of unofficial Trump advisers had talked their way into the Oval Office and an audience with the president of the United States to argue the election had been stolen by shadowy foreign powers — perhaps remotely via Nest thermostats.”
“For hours, the group tried to persuade Trump to take extraordinary, potentially illegal action to ignore the election results and try to stay in power. And for hours, some of Trump’s actual White House advisers tried to persuade him that those ideas were, in the words of one lawyer who participated, ‘nuts.’”
New York Times: “Even by the standards of the Trump White House, a meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, that was highlighted Tuesday by the Jan. 6 committee was extreme.”
“New testimony from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone prompted the Jan. 6 committee to delay a hearing that had been informally planned for this Thursday hearing by a week,” Axios reports.
Said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD): “I know that we’ve just changed Thursday’s meeting to next Thursday… I think we were shooting for this Thursday, but now we have an infusion of new testimony.”
He added: “I think that Cipollone’s testimony has opened up a number of different avenues.”
Jake Tapper interviewed former Trump national security adviser John Bolton on CNN:
TAPPER: One doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.
BOLTON: I disagree with that. As somebody who has helped plan coup d’etat, not here, but other places, it takes a lot of work.
The January 6 Committee featured video at their hearing today showing Ivanka Trump denying she wanted to attend the Ellipse speech with her father to try to calm him down — and then cut to video of her former chief-of-staff affirming exactly that.
The Austin American Statesman has disturbing video of the police response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
“The video tells in real time the brutal story of how heavily armed officers failed to immediately launch a cohesive and aggressive response to stop the shooter and save more children if possible.”
An example: “At 12:30, an officer inside the school wearing a helmet and ballistic vest pauses to squirt hand sanitizer from a wall-mounted dispenser and rubs his hands together.”
Mother Jones has leaked audio showing that on October 31, 2020, Steve Bannon “told a group of associates that President Donald Trump had a plan to declare victory on election night—even if he was losing.”
“Trump knew that the slow counting of Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots meant the returns would show early leads for him in key states. His ‘strategy’ was to use this fact to assert that he had won, while claiming that the inevitable shifts in vote totals toward Joe Biden must be the result of fraud, Bannon explained.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) ended today’s hearing with a big final revelation saying that Donald Trump himself tried to call a witness that hasn’t been heard publicly from by the January 6 Committee yet.
The witness did not answer his call and alerted their lawyer, who alerted the committee.
Said Cheney: “This committee has supplied that information to the Department of Justice.”
The U.S. Senate confirmed Steve Dettelbach to run Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, 48 to 46.
He’s he first confirmed director since 2015.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) explained a difference she’s noticed in how Trump-linked lawyers are dealing with the January 6 Committee in recent weeks.
Said Cheney: “Initially, their strategy in some cases appeared to be to deny and delay. Today, there appears to be a general recognition that the committee has established key facts, including that virtually everyone close to President Trump – his Justice Department officials, his White House advisers, his White House counsel, his campaign – all told him the 2020 election was not stolen… Now the argument seems to be that President Trump was manipulated by others outside the administration. That he was persuaded to ignore his closest advisers, and that he was incapable of telling right from wrong…”
But Cheney isn’t buying it: “President Trump is a 76-year old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices. As our investigation has shown, Donald Trump had access to more detailed and specific information showing that the election was not actually stolen than almost any other American. And he was told this over and over again. No rational or sane man in his position can disregard that information and reach the opposite conclusion. And Donald Trump cannot escape responsibility by being willfully blind.”
After a disastrous day in court yesterday, Steve Bannon vowed on his podcast to go scorched earth on his adversaries — including the January 6 Committee.
Said Bannon: “Pray for our enemies, because we’re going medieval on these people. We’re gonna savage our enemies. Who needs prayers? Certainly not Steven K. Bannon.”
The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is holding its seventh public hearing at 1 p.m. ET today.
The hearing is expected to focus on how the violent mob came together and the Trump administration’s ties to the extremist groups that participated.
CNN reports the hearing will include fresh evidence of “encrypted messages between Trump allies and members of extremist groups.”
A live stream is available.
Please leave your reactions in the comments.
Sen. Lindsey Graham told CNN he would fight a judge’s order for him to testify before a grand jury in the probe over Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia.
Said Graham: “We will be going to court to contest the subpoena. Stay tuned — our lawyers are involved.”
Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman (D) “has an in-person fundraiser scheduled for later this month, suggesting his return to the campaign trail is imminent following his stroke two months ago,” National Journal reports.
“But even if he’s back to shaking hands and kissing babies within the next few days, the stretch of time he has spent away from the Senate race is nearly unprecedented in recent political history.”
“First Lady Jill Biden apologized for comparing the diversity of Hispanics to that of breakfast tacos, a comment that drew widespread ridicule, and not just from Republicans eager to embarrass the White House,” the Dallas Morning News reports.
“Unlike some of her husband’s most cringeworthy bloopers, the taco comment was scripted – included in the prepared text released by her office before she began speaking.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.