Special counsel Jack Smith is dropping the federal election subversion and the mishandling of classified documents cases against President-elect Donald Trump, seeking the cases’ dismissal in court filings Monday, CNN reports.
Wrote Smith: “The Justice Department’s position is that the Constitution requires that this case be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated. This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant.”
“If you felt a gust of wind from out of the Northeast, it was the collective sigh of relief coming from New York’s financial district over Donald Trump’s selection of Scott Bessent to lead Treasury,” Politico reports.
“After a series of unorthodox Cabinet picks that shocked the policy world, Trump’s choice of the 62-year-old hedge fund executive is being praised by Wall Street heavyweights who had hoped the president-elect would select a more traditional candidate for his administration’s most powerful economic post. While Bessent — once the chief investor at financier George Soros’ firm — has been a vocal proponent of Trump’s agenda, he’s also viewed as a realist who will understand how policy shifts might ripple across markets and the global economy.”
CNN: “The perception of danger is a hurdle quickly becoming one of the country’s biggest obstacles to uploading a glut of climate-friendly energy onto the grid.”
“Federal officials are pleading with communities to say yes to storing spent fuel. No state has yet raised its hand to store the country’s nuclear energy waste, despite the lucrative deals it could foment.”
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“Donald Trump’s transition team is putting together a wide-ranging energy package to roll out within days of his taking office that would approve export permits for new liquefied natural gas projects and increase oil drilling off the U.S. coast and on federal lands,“ Reuters reports.
“The energy checklist largely reflects promises Trump made on the campaign trail, but the plan to roll out the list as early as day one ensures that oil and gas production will rank alongside immigration as a pillar of Trump’s early agenda.”
New York Times: How Trump could upend electric car sales.
New York Times: “When students have protested this fall, administrators have often enforced—to the letter—new rules created in response to last spring’s unrest. The moves have created scenes that would have been hard to imagine previously, particularly at universities that once celebrated their history of student activism…”
“The changes follow federal civil rights complaints, lawsuits and withering congressional scrutiny accusing universities of tolerating antisemitism, after some protesters praised Hamas and called for violence against Israelis.”
New York Times: “Flash displays of hate and white power are happening more frequently in the United States, a trend that experts say is a reaction to changing demographics, political turmoil and social catalysts. More than 750 such incidents have taken place since 2020, according to the Anti-Defamation League, with more than half of them occurring in the last 18 months.”
“National experts describe a familiar pattern: Small groups of mostly masked men chant and wave swastika or white power flags in public and yell racial slurs at targets as varied as immigrants, Black people, Jews and L.G.B.T.Q. people. They unfurl offensive banners over highways or post racist fliers in communities. The demonstrations are typically captured on video and ricochet across social media to large audiences.”
“With a motion for civil contempt already looming over him in Washington, D.C., another judge warned Rudy Giuliani that ‘on pain of contempt’ he must comply with requests from the Georgia election workers he defamed to surrender his assets squirreled away in an increasingly controversial storage unit on New York’s Long Island,” the HuffPost reports.
Greg Sargent: “Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration as Donald Trump’s attorney general is unquestionably a big victory for the rule of law. But now that Trump has put forth Pam Bondi—the former Florida attorney general whose loyalty to Trump is almost as slavish as Gaetz’s—it raises a question: Why assume she’ll be any less wedded to his agenda of unleashing the Justice Department on his enemies and otherwise reducing it to a tool of his most corrupt designs and whims?”
“Two in-house investigators at U.S. intelligence agencies recently quit their jobs. There’s growing fear in Washington that they could be the start of an exodus — or a purge — of government watchdogs,” Politico reports.
“A wave of departures by inspectors general would give President-elect Donald Trump the opportunity to nominate or appoint people of his choice to the watchdog posts — leaving dozens of federal departments, agencies and offices subject to oversight by people who would owe their positions to Trump.”
Israel and Lebanon have agreed to the terms of a ceasefire agreement to end the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, Axios reports.
Bluesky has “blown past” its user growth projections so much that it’s racing to get more servers to keep the site running smoothly, Insider reports.
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Semafor: “CNN’s leadership says it doesn’t want to go back to its wall-to-wall 24-hour coverage of Donald Trump when he returns to the White House in January. But the network is considering shifting its lineup in a way that would lean into the spectacle of the president-elect’s new administration.”
“CNN is considering making network anchor Kaitlan Collins its chief White House correspondent, two people familiar with the discussions said. As part of the change, Collins and her show would relocate, at least part of the time, to Washington, D.C. from New York.”
Slate: “On War Room, the battle for the heart of the Republican Party is just as urgent as the battle against the Democrats, if not more so.”
“Bannon’s great victory on election night was over not the Harris campaign but the idea that Republicans needed to moderate their stances on immigration and far-right isolationism…”
Wall Street Journal: “Republicans are trying to fit as many priorities as possible into one bill early next year, combining tax cuts, spending cuts, energy policy, border security and President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises.”
“Engineering the legislation that way can help the party completely sideline Democrats, and it is Republicans’ best chance to quickly exploit unified control of the House, Senate and White House. Strike first, strike hard, no mercy, to borrow an ’80s movie catchphrase.”
“But balance is key. The path ahead is a political, arithmetical and procedural tightrope.”
“Scott Bessent spent the past 40 years studying economic history. Now, as Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Treasury Department, he has the chance to make his mark on it,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“As a hedge-fund manager, first at George Soros’s firm and later at his own, Bessent specialized in macroinvesting, or analyzing geopolitical situations and economic data to wager on big-picture market moves. He generated billions of dollars in profits betting on and against currencies, interest rates, stocks and other asset classes around the world.”
“He was motivated to step out from behind his desk and get involved with Trump’s campaign in part because of a view that time is running out for the U.S. economy to grow its way out of excessive budget deficits and indebtedness.”
Politico: “The Trump transition’s unprecedented delay in signing the agreements has so far prevented the incoming administration from having any formal contact with federal agencies, including sending in groups of policy advisers known as ‘landing teams.’ It also means they can’t access cybersecurity support or secure email servers for transition-related work, or request FBI background checks for their nominees.”
“Both the Trump transition and the White House confirmed that negotiations on the agreements are still underway. But until the standoff is resolved, Trump’s Cabinet nominees will gain no more insight than the general public into the workings of the departments they’re supposed to run.”
“It’s one thing to call for the largest deportation in American history. It’s another to pull it off logistically, given the highly complex process of spotting, detaining, holding and evicting people in the U.S. illegally,” Axios reports.
“The judicial process — one small piece of a long, expensive deportation machinery — illustrates vividly the complexity ahead.”
“President-elect Trump has unabashedly surrounded himself with men who’ve said, done or been accused of things that would disqualify them under any other U.S. leader in our lifetimes,” Axios reports.
“It begs the question: Why? Why go to the mat to pick and defend people Trump knows will raise questions about his judgment, heart or morality?”
“In almost every case, there are similarly loyal and tested alternatives. Yet he often goes with the bad boys.”
“People who know Trump best tell us the answer lies in his view of humanity and power. Trump, they say, values loyalty, toughness, street smarts and self-protection foremost — and believes most people do bad things to get, hold and use power. Business and sexual transgressions don’t trouble him like they do other presidents.”
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.
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