A federal judge in Colorado has sanctioned two lawyers who filed a lawsuit challenging the 2020 election late last year, calling the suit “one enormous conspiracy theory,” and ordering pro-Trump lawyers Gary Fielder and Ernest John Walker to pay the legal fees of all the individuals and companies they had sued as a way to deter future similar cases, the Washington Post reports.

“Six months since leaving office, former President Donald Trump is sitting on a $102 million war chest,” Politico reports.

“But having whipped his supporters into a frenzy with pledges to overturn the election and promises to support Republican candidates in the midterms, he is not spending his campaign money on either.”

Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told Newsmax that the former president has been holding meetings with his “cabinet” despite not being president.

“Former President Donald Trump has $102 million in political cash that he can wield as the GOP eyes retaking majorities in Congress next year,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The fundraising figures show that even after losing the 2020 election and being banned from multiple social-media platforms, Mr. Trump remains a draw for donations from Republican voters, particularly through email and text message solicitations.”

“Despite departing from office and being barred from the leading social media platforms, former President Donald J. Trump was the Republican Party’s most dominant fund-raiser in the early months of 2021, as committees affiliated with him collected more than $56 million online,” the New York Times reports.

“Trump has not had a big win in quite a while. I think without wins, his political capital is depleted.”

— GOP strategist Alex Conant, quoted by The Hill.

The House Oversight Committee released handwritten notes by former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue of a call with former Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Donald Trump on Dec. 27, 2020 in which he sought their help in trying to overturn the results of the presidential election.

Trump asked them to “just say that the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.”

Best line: “You guys may not be following the internet the way I do.”

New York Times: “The demands were an extraordinary instance of a president interfering with an agency that is typically more independent from the White House to advance his personal agenda. They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging campaign during his final weeks in office to delegitimize the election results.”

“Donald Trump promised to give away his $400,000 presidential salary. And he kept that promise, publicly announcing each gift — at least, for his first three and a half years in office. Then, in the middle of last year, the announcements stopped,” the Washington Post reports.

“Trump’s White House never said where — or even if — he donated the last $220,000 of his salary, covering the final six months of 2020 and the first 20 days of 2021.”

Philip Bump: “One is that he’s centering many of them on retribution and loyalty, elevating candidates seemingly on a whim because they are running against people who opposed his false claims about election fraud or who voted to impeach him. This means endorsing challengers who will face opponents who have the advantage of incumbency, meaning they face an uphill climb from the outset.”

“The other thing hampering his endorsements is that Trump came into politics without a sophisticated sense of how elections work and never developed that sense as president. So he endorses candidates who probably could have used a bit more vetting, like his pick of a former aide, Max Miller, to challenge a pro-impeachment legislator in Ohio. Miller is accused of assaulting a member of Trump’s own administration. (He denies it.) Or Trump endorses based on who other people think is going to win, hoping to add an easy win to the scales.”

“Why are so many millions of Americans sitting at home, wondering when President Trump will come back?”

— Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), quoted by ABC News.

“President Donald Trump called his acting attorney general nearly every day at the end of last year to alert him to claims of voter fraud or alleged improper vote counts in the 2020 election,” the Washington Post reports.

“The personal pressure campaign, which has not been previously reported, involved repeated phone calls to acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen in which Trump raised various allegations he had heard about and asked what the Justice Department was doing about the issue.”

Reuters: “He’s in the final stages of launching an investment firm called Affinity Partners that will be headquartered in Miami.”

“Kushner is also looking to open an office in Israel.”

Olga Khazan: “Trump’s failures to permanently change government policy were remarkably diverse. Even when his administration pursued classically Republican agenda items, such as cutting food stamps, and had lots of outside help from conservative advocacy groups, it ran into trouble. For a time, the Trump administration did significantly change the way food stamps worked. But in that realm, too, few of Trump’s changes stuck: Some were struck down by courts, and others were reversed by the Biden administration.”

“The Trump administration seems to have fundamentally underestimated the difficulty of changing U.S. government policy: As of April, out of the 259 regulations, guidance documents, and agency memoranda it issued that were challenged in court, 200, or 77 percent, were unsuccessful… A typical administration loses more like 30 percent of the time.”

Andrew Ballard, Hans Hassell, and Michael Heseltine writing in Mischiefs of Faction:

“Our newly-published research on the 2018 midterm elections suggests that receiving the public backing of Trump may ultimately harm candidates in close races – so Republican candidates looking for electoral success may want to think carefully before welcoming Trump’s endorsement.”

“We discovered that Trump’s endorsements inadvertently helped Democratic candidates more. Democrats were quick to link their Republican opponents to the unpopular president, and many used the president’s endorsements in their own fundraising efforts. Subsequently, Democratic opponents of endorsed Republicans raised more money from more donors immediately following the president’s endorsement of the Republican candidate.”