Trump’s Vengeance Tour Has Already Started
The president-elect wants Liz Cheney jailed. Now her ex-colleagues are setting up her show trial.
Going forward, how are we going to hash out how much the government spends and on what? Through a combination of public edicts from Elon Musk and harried Fox News appearances from Speaker Mike Johnson, apparently. Musk denounced Johnson’s short-term spending plan to keep the government open in last night, forcing the man third in line to the presidency to scurry to do damage control.
“I was communicating with Elon last night,” Johnson said on Fox News this morning. “Elon, Vivek [Ramaswamy], and I are on a text chain together and I was explaining to them the background of this. And then Vivek and I talked last night until almost midnight. . . . They understand the situation. They said, ‘It’s not directed at you, Mr. Speaker, but we don’t like the spending.’ And I said, ‘Guess what, fellas? I don’t either.’”
Are we allowed to be consoled that the speaker of the House isn’t having much fun either? Happy Wednesday.
House GOP to Kash Patel: Do Liz First
by Andrew Egger
Last week, I noted with alarm that House Republicans were shrugging off—or even approving of—Donald Trump wanting to jail some of their past and current colleagues who served on the January 6th Committee. As it turns out, I underestimated their bloodthirstiness.
Yesterday, a key House Republican released a report directly calling for a criminal investigation into former Rep. Liz Cheney for her committee work.
The report came from Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), whom House Republicans tapped two years ago to spearhead the House Administration Committee’s probe into the actions of the January 6th Committee itself. It was clear from the start that Loudermilk’s primary goal was to shift blame for the attempted insurrection away from Trump. His report works plenty hard at that.
What wasn’t expected was what Loudermilk would bring forward as his number-one “top finding”: “Former Representative Liz Cheney colluded with ‘star witness’ Cassidy Hutchinson without Hutchinson’s attorney’s knowledge. Former Representative Liz Cheney should be investigated for potential criminal witness tampering based on the new information about her communication.”
Testimony from Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s onetime chief of staff Mark Meadows, featured prominently in the January 6th Committee’s work. Loudermilk focuses in on the fact that Hutchinson, who by her own account originally intended to keep her head down and clam up—even asking Team Trump for a lawyer to represent her through her interactions with the committee—had a change of heart midway through. Bracing to break with Trump world, Hutchinson reached out to Cheney for advice, and they had several conversations without Hutchinson’s Trump-issued lawyer present.
“Representative Cheney’s influence on Hutchinson is apparent from that point forward by her dramatic change in testimony and eventual claims against President Trump using second- and thirdhand accounts,” the report reads.
This is incredibly weak milktea on any level. Hutchinson clearly intended to open up to Cheney’s committee before Cheney ever spoke with her. That’s obvious from the fact that it was Hutchinson who initiated the contact, not Cheney. The idea that this amounted to witness-tampering on Cheney’s behalf would be too stupid to entertain if not for the fact that the country’s most powerful people are trying to pass it off with a straight face.
In a statement, Cheney denounced Loudermilk’s report as “a malicious and cowardly assault on the truth.” “No reputable lawyer, legislator or judge,” she added, “would take this seriously.”
Loudermilk has gone over all this ground before. It was back in October that he first zeroed in on the fact that Cheney had spoken with Hutchinson without her lawyer’s knowledge. Then, however, he was couching it simply as a possible violation on Cheney’s part of her professional ethics as a lawyer: “Cheney had an ethical responsibility to only communicate with Hutchinson with her attorney present.”
As legal analyst Jonathan Turley—certainly no friend of the January 6th Committee!—noted at the time, even this question is murky: Cheney wasn’t operating in a role as opposing counsel, but “as a member of Congress in this matter” who “had an institutional interest, if not a duty, to pursue witnesses.”
But there’s worlds of difference between merely suggesting Cheney violated professional ethics, as Loudermilk was doing just months ago, and suggesting she committed crimes, as he does now while looking at the very same fact pattern. Surely that change wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain someone’s calls, in the interim, for Cheney to go to jail?
“Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee, which states that ‘numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, and these violations should be investigated by the FBI,’” that certain someone posted on his social media platform at 3:30 this morning. “Thank you to Congressman Barry Loudermilk on a job well done.”
Things are moving fast these days, so let’s take a quick step back here. Trump has repeatedly and baselessly stated he believes those who investigated him for his role in the January 6th riots are guilty of treason and should be jailed. He’s nominated an FBI director, Kash Patel, whose chief qualification for the job is that he’s pledged—repeatedly, publicly, enthusiastically—to prosecute Trump’s political enemies. And House Republicans are using their institutional heft not merely to shield Trump from further accountability for the insurrection but to serve those enemies up to Patel on a platter.
We don’t need to wait for times to get dark. It’s all happening already.
Tulsi in Trouble?
by William Kristol
I’d first intended to write this morning an item following up on some of the implications of Andrew’s fine account of the Loudermilk report.
But perhaps the last thing you need a week before Christmas and Hanukkah is another expression of alarm from me? So I’ll spare you . . . for today.
But first, for the sake of clarity and honesty, I do want to repeat: I am alarmed. Very alarmed. And I expect to sound the alarm on many more occasions.
Still, this morning, let me call to your attention a new report from Reuters on Tulsi Gabbard having confirmation troubles on the Hill. It cheered me. And you deserve some cheer too.
Here was the Reuters headline: “Exclusive: Some Republican senators reluctant on Gabbard for spy chief.” Andrea Shalal and Gram Slattery report:
Eight Republican senators are unsure about supporting former Democratic member of congress Tulsi Gabbard to become America’s top spy, according to a Trump transition source and a second source with knowledge of the issue, increasing doubts about whether her nomination will secure Senate confirmation.
A Trump associate in close contact with the team trying to push the president-elect’s nominees through the Senate also said there was serious pessimism about whether Gabbard could secure the votes she needs to become director of national intelligence.
Shalal and Slattery reported in particular that the “senators harbored doubts about supporting the former lawmaker because she was unprepared to answer tough questions during an initial round of meetings last week on Capitol Hill.”
I take this report seriously partly because it dovetails with accounts I heard over the weekend from friends who are still in touch with Hill Republicans. They all had heard that several senators were struck by just how unprepared Gabbard was for her meetings with them. One apparently commented that it was as if she was so confident of getting confirmed that she hadn’t even bothered to read the briefing book. Another reportedly said she didn’t understand basic aspects of how the job of director of national intelligence works or basic facts about some of the obvious challenges the next administration will face. There was discussion among senators that the confirmation hearing, if it got to that, could be a real fiasco, and that maybe they could get Trump to withdraw the nomination.
Asked to comment, Trump transition spokesperson Alexa Henning sent The Bulwark the same statement she’d given Reuters: “There is not one GOP senator on the record that opposes Lt. Col. Gabbard’s nomination. Again, this is anonymous sources desperately trying to hold on to power, so they hide behind the media to spread these falsities that directly subvert the will of the people.”
We’ll see if Republican senators show the gumption to follow through on these reported judgments. But it does seem to me Gabbard could go the way of Gaetz. This would be good, since Gabbard is a particularly dangerous nominee for a particularly sensitive job.
All of this is also a reminder that the confirmation process can be unpredictable. Not only can new evidence emerge about nominees, but the hearings themselves are a potential wild card. So I think it quite possible that one, two, or even all three of the worst nominees—Hegseth, Kennedy, and Patel—could fail.
It’s still going to be a long and, I’m afraid, often dark four years. But in the words of the Bard:
Receive what cheer you may,
The night is long that never finds the day.
Quick Hits
BUSINESS AS USUAL: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has risen through the Democratic ranks in Congress faster than anyone would have believed when she first burst on the scene as an iconoclastic socialist hellion back in 2019, before she made nice with Nancy Pelosi and emerged as a staunch ally of President Joe Biden. Her bid to serve as ranking member of the House Oversight Committee—launched against Steering Committee-blessed Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.)—was a testament to her growing reach. But she fell short Tuesday in a vote of the conference, 131-84.
The outcome left a number of prominent Dems off the Hill befuddled. “She isn’t just a social media star—she does her homework,” one card-carrying member of the establishment class told us. Still, for Connolly’s allies, it was a simple choice: The House is a hierarchical structure, and he’s a longtime Oversight member who had seniority.
Fair enough—but he’s also a 74-year-old man currently fighting esophageal cancer. Oversight Republicans are signalling they’ll likely use their time atop the committee to go after Trump’s enemies, and committee Democrats will have their work cut out for them to oppose their overreaches. Connolly may be up for the task or he may not. But Democrats already learned one painful lesson this year: Father Time is undefeated.
Putting AOC in the top Oversight spot might have had another benefit for Democrats as well: Encouraging her to keep fire focused on Trump rather than spending her time and energy harassing Democrats from the left. On the whole, not an incredibly reassuring sign that House Democrats, to borrow a phrase, know what time it is.
A PAINFUL END: Would you believe us if we told you Joe Biden remains the president? The New York Times reports on the quiet, almost ghostly end to his half-decade political career:
Time is catching up with Mr. Biden. He looks a little older and a little slower with each passing day. Aides say he remains plenty sharp in the Situation Room, calling world leaders to broker a cease-fire in Lebanon or deal with the chaos of Syria’s rebellion. But it is hard to imagine that he seriously thought he could do the world’s most stressful job for another four years. . . .
Biden has absented himself from the debate convulsing the country. After warning again and again that Mr. Trump posed an existential threat to American democracy, he has now gone silent on the matter and even aides decline to answer questions on whether the incoming president is still a danger. A traditionalist to his bones, Mr. Biden has opted for the grace and reticence he believes are befitting the departing president of a defeated party, even as the incoming president threatens to imprison opponents and tries to install conspiracy-minded acolytes in positions of power.
Cheap Shots
I didn't have the Speaker of the House taking orders from a South African immigrant on my 2024 bingo card.
But America wanted four more years of this.
It would have been nice to see AOC get the ranking position in Oversight. When the Democrats have talent, they need to feature it, and she has been an upstanding member of the party for some time now. It was a mistake not to elect her to the post.