Everyone Does It? 🌻 🌻 🌻

🤡 🤡 🤡 Everywhere:  It’s becoming increasingly clear that despite his and their denials Kevin McCarthy really did promise the wackos, insurrectionists, and election deniers everything to secure his speakership.  Yesterday Kevin fulfilled some of those promises.  He announced his appointments to the newly created Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Government.  The subcommittee, the love child of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist hunting Un-American Activities Committee and Nixon’s CREEP will be chaired by Jim “Gym” Jordan and will include Republicans Darrell Issa, Thomas Massie, Chris Stewart, Elise Stefanik, Mike Johnson, Chip Roy, Kelly Armstrong, Greg Stuebe, Dan Bishop, Kat Cammack and Harriet Hageman, a group like those in the bar scene from the original Star Wars but more malevolent.  McCarthy also added some hardliners to the Rules Committee including two Freedom Caucus members, Ralph Norman and Chip Roy, who were among the holdouts who tried to block his Speakership, and Thomas Massie who Axios describes as a staunchly anti-establishment renegade.  The Rules Committee matters because its members determine what legislation makes it to the floor for a vote. To round out his day McCarthy rejected Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries’ reappointment of both Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell to the House Intelligence Committee. That’s not a surprise, but still it’s small minded and retaliatory, a nod to Trump who hates “little pencil neck” Schiff for leading the first impeachment trial and payback for Margie Q and Paul Gosar losing their committee assignments, by a bi-partisan vote, during Nancy’s reign not because of their opinions or policy views but because they threatened the lives of some of their Democratic colleagues.  McCarthy also says that he plans to kick Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee purportedly to punish her for the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic remarks she made back during the last Congress.  I’m no fan of Omar’s but it’s hard to believe that McCarthy really cares about any of that, this is just more retaliation. Unfortunately for Kevin, getting rid of Omar won’t be as easy as kicking Schiff and Swalwell off Intel which is a select committee since Speaker’s only get to reject the other party’s appointments to select committees, to kick Omar off of Foreign Affairs he’ll have to go for a full floor vote and already two Republicans, Nancy Mace and Victoria Spartz, say they oppose kicking Omar off Foreign Affairs, not because they share her views but on principle. Since Greg Steube, the Republican who fell off his roof, remains sidelined in Florida with a fractured pelvis and punctured lung, Kevin can’t afford many more vote defections which is one more reason that Congressman of many names Santos, remains in the House.  That said, even Kevin appears to be losing patience with Santos, yesterday he said that he’ll kick him to the curb if the House Ethics Committee concludes that he did anything illegal.  As to Santos, he once claimed that he was mugged on Fifth Avenue and stripped of his shoes in front of Trump Tower by some white guys and that no one came to his assistance, poor thing.  That’s not the kind of thing that will get him ejected but one thing that might is his finance shenanigans.  To that end, yesterday he amended a campaign filing, deleting the claim that he loaned his campaign $500,000 but failing to explain where those funds came from.  One other weird thing, not about Santos but about that other Floridian Matt Gaetz, yesterday Twitter was a flutter with some more allegations against him, something about his office in disarray over an alleged affair with a male staffer as well as some more underage dalliances.  That could be just malicious gossip but sometimes, just sometimes where there’s smoke there’s fire.  Well maybe.  As dalliances, CPAC’s Matt Schlapp still hasn’t denied his unwanted groping of a Herschel Walker campaign aide but his wife, Mercedes, and at least one member of his staff have gone on the offensive against the trying to remain anonymous accuser, posting the guy’s name on Twitter, accusing him of being a miscreant with lots of personal problems.

Check Your Files:  It turns out that presidents and vice presidents leaving office with confidential files is a thing.  Yesterday, despite an earlier televised assertion that he was too perfect to have ever taken any confidential files home with him, former VP Pence did. Pence’s documents were found stashed in a box that had been kept in storage while the homeless Pence was shopping for a new post VP  house.  His document situation appears to be more akin to President Biden’s than Trump’s as his cache of purloined papers is small and, upon discovery, he did what you are supposed to do, handing the documents over to the authorities.  Nevertheless, Pence’s discovery complicates the document dilemma for AG Garland and all the Republicans who’ve been attacking Biden which probably explains why Fox’s Sean Hannity reverted to Hillary Clinton and her “acid washed” emails last night. Note to all former living presidents and vice presidents, check your files ASAP.  Garland is now in the unenviable position of having to decide what to do about Pence’s documents, whether Mike’s screw up warrants another Special Counsel or whether Pence can go Dutch with Biden, or whether the situation can be handled by an ordinary member of Garland’s squad at least until Pence declares his candidacy. Moreover, though Pence’s situation and Biden’s both appear, at least so far, to be vastly different than Trump’s, the “everyone does it” defense might complicate Jack Smith’s decision on whether to recommend prosecuting Trump for his greater malfeasance. None of this matters in Fulton County, Georgia where things appear to be reaching their boiling point.  Yesterday, District Attorney Fani Willis, the prosecutor investigating Trump and his Kraken cronies for criminal interference in the Georgia 2020 presidential election told a judge that decisions on whether and whom to charge “are Imminent.”

Law Enforcement?  On Monday, Charles McGonigal, a former top counter-intelligence agent who was based in the FBI’s NY office was accused of taking money from a former Albanian intelligence employee and from a representative of sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.  McGonigal retired from the FBI in 2018 but was around during the 2016 election, was knee deep in the investigation into things Russian, and is accused of receiving the Albanian bribes while he was still on the FBI payroll.  This whole situation is durian level stinky. Putting aside the bribe taking and the post FBI work he did for Deripaska, someone that the convicted then pardoned Paul Manafort was in bed with, there have been rumors for some time that Trump and Giuliani had friends with benefits in the New York office of the FBI and that former FBI Director Comey held his election influencing press conference about Hilary Clinton’s emails over concerns that some agents in the NY FBI were about to start leaking.  This could be nothing or it could be a bigger story than illegal payments or any of those juicy whispers about the Matts, Gaetz and Schlapp.