Let’s have some not-war news. Not that it’s necessarily more cheerful.
House Republicans are going to put Steve Scalise forward as potentially the next Speaker. He beat Gym Jordan in a secret ballot vote, 113 to 99. And he’s going to have to win nearly all of those Jordan votes to get the Speaker’s gavel. It’ll happen when it happens, maybe. Not holding my breath.
Yesterday Aaron Blake wrote about A tantalizing detail in a new Trump legal filing. It appears Jack Smith and crew have a theory about Trump’s motivations for hanging on to classified documents. “The government apparently thinks it knows ‘what Trump intended’ with the documents,” Blake wrote. “And it’s signaling that it plans to prove that intent.”
Of course, we don’t know what Jack Smith knows, yet. I tend to go with the “beautiful mind” theory of Trump document boarding, that he kept his hands on all those secret documents because something about them symbolized the status of POTUS for him, and he couldn’t let them go. An alternate theory is that there is information in them that Trump thinks he might use against his opponents.
George Santos has been hit with new charges.
The 23-count superseding indictment alleges Santos took financial information from his donors and ran their credit cards for more cash during last year’s election cycle. Per the federal prosecutors, Santos “repeatedly, without their authorization” charged the credit cards of his contributors before siphoning the money off to himself, his own campaign, and other election operations.
Santos was previously indicted in May on fraud and money laundering charges related to his alleged efforts to receive unemployment benefits while he was employed. At the time, prosecutors accused Santos of having “pocketed campaign contributions and used that money to pay down personal debts and buy designer clothing.” There are 10 additional counts in the new superseding indictment, including aggravated identity theft, access device fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy, false statements, and falsifying records.
Santos denies he is guilty of anything and says he will refuse to take a plea deal. Of course, we don’t know that he’s been offered a plea deal. House Republicans from New York are either about about to introduce a resolution to expel Santos from Congress, or maybe they have done that already.
The rationality-challenged Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced on Monday that he would run for President as an independent. Instantanteously, all the Republicans who had been encouraging him to run changed their minds. The Republican National Committee dismissed Kennedy as “just another radical, far-left Democrat.” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel called him “a typical elitist liberal.”
Michael Scherer writes at WaPo,
The attacks came as Democrats remained largely silent on Kennedy’s shift, reflecting a relative optimism among the party’s top strategists that Kennedy poses little threat to Biden as an independent candidate. Kennedy’s polling in the Democratic nomination fight had fallen in recent months, and current national polling shows higher approval ratings for Kennedy among Republican voters than Democratic voters.
In other words, it dawned on them that Kennedy could take more votes from the Republican nominee than from President Biden. Whoops!