FBI agents were seen Wednesday at a home owned by President Biden in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, conducting a search sources tell CBS’s Arden Farhi is in connection to documents from the Obama era. Farhi added in a later update that the search was consensual and the agents were invited without a warrant. “Today, with the President’s full support and cooperation, the DOJ is conducting a planned search of his home in Rehoboth, Delaware. Under DOJ’s standard procedures, in the interests of operational security and integrity, it sought to do this work without advance public notice, and we agreed to cooperate. The search today is a further step in a thorough and timely DOJ process we will continue to fully support and facilitate. We will have further information at the conclusion of today’s search,” said Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer in statement.

Still probably not going to make Trump fans happy even though this is what they angrily demanded after the FBI raided fat former President Trump’s hooked pad in Florida last August.

An Iowa MAGA insurrectionist who already served 30 days in jail for his role in the Capitol riot was arrested again last week after being caught planting his phone to record a woman getting undressed to use a tanning bed at a salon his family owns, the Des Moines Register reports. Daryl Johnson, 52, is charged with misdemeanor invasion of privacy according to a criminal complaint which says Johnson had placed his phone on top of a dividing wall between the tanning rooms at the iSun Tan 24/7 salon in Clear Lake, Iowa. It’s not clear if the woman spotted the phone after tanning or someone else reported him to police for his perverted behavior, but the report notes that the hardcore Trump fan resisted handing his phone over to cops prior to the arrest.

Johnson, along with his son, Daniel Johnson, pleaded guilty last year to felony civil disorder in a case a DC judge called “more egregious than most of the January 6 cases I’ve sentenced to date,” while tossing Johnson into the clink for a month last June. Daniel Johnson got four months in the same sentencing. The two helped hold a set of doors open for other rioters to enter the Capitol as the battle raged. “Mark my words Yesterday will be the beginning of the revolution,” Daryl wrote on social media the next day, adding there could be “hangings on the front lawn of the capital.”

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it yet again: More and more of these people keep turning out to be just complete pieces of shit personally, separate and apart from their politics. We’re still waiting for a MAGA reader to bring to our attention a Capitol rioter who was a genuinely, objectively decent human being who devoted their life to charity work or whatever else might win others over. All we see are these sort of stories of sickening, very much deplorable behavior in their personal lives.

Republicans in Arizona and nationally are already almost resigned to MAGA freak 2022 losers Blake Masters and Kari Lake running for what should be a solid pickup opportunity as the Senate seat currently occupied by flaky “independent” Kyrsten Sinema is up in 2024, Politico reports.

“Just look at what happened in the last two elections. You in no way have to guess what happens when MAGA candidates ignore bread-and-butter issues that Arizonans care about. Kari Lake is not governor. Blake Masters is not senator. Republicans have to get back to basics,” said Arizona GOP strategist Barrett Marson, correctly worried that GOP primary voters are going to fuck this up again.

“Any candidate in ’24 that has, as their principal campaign theme, a stolen election, is probably going to have the same issues that some of the ’22 candidates had,” said Senate GOP second in command John Thune. “I just don’t think that’s where the American public is. It’s a swing state – we need to have a good Republican nominee, obviously. You know, whoever gets in, I hope they focus on the future, not the past,” Thune added, as if the shit about “stolen elections” is going to suddenly go away in 2024, especially in the likely event of Trump being at the top of their ticket.

Fat former President Trump’s campaign staff are building an oppo file on Napoleonic Florida Gov Ron DeSantis consisting of statements and video of Ron encouraging people to get vaccinated against COVID-19 early in 2021 to show he’s full of shit on the issue, the New York Times reports.

The files, to be deployed when DeSantis attacks Trump’s “vulnerability” on vaccines, include video of Ron hailing delivery of Florida’s first doses, “b-roll” of him pushing an old lady in a wheelchair into a vaccination site, and so on and so forth. In a way it’s quintessentially Trump: Rather than make it a “good” thing, he has to turn it into “Hey this guy was just as bad as me.”

Connecticut may exonerate people accused of witchcraft https://t.co/nVOqWi65td

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 1, 2023

The missing “highly radioactive capsule” has been found in Western Australia, 9News reports. If you don’t know what we’re talking about then don’t worry about it. We didn’t cover it because other news got in the way. It wasn’t that interesting, despite what the headline might have implied.

Imagine my shock getting the email that baseball was canceled, and by one of those judgy, fascist tech companies Elon Musk warned us about!  That’s right, libs:  YouTube, and therefore its parent company Google and therefore its parent company Alphabet, have canceled baseball just like DirecTV has canceled all conservative broadcasting in the world by dropping its carriage agreement with Newsmax.  Get outraged because you’ll never be able to see baseball–and maybe any sport–ever again if Google decides you can’t!  (… except for the networks YouTube TV’s email lists as carrying Major League Baseball games.)

Asked by the Fox crypt keeper his reaction to Republican former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley sort-of officially entering the 2024 GOP presidential nomination race, Republican Ohio Senator and Nick Offerman wannabe JD Vance responds that he’s drinking the overpriced Trump Kool-Aid®:  “Well, Laura, you know I’ve endorsed, uh, President Trump.  I think he’s the likely nominee in 2024, well, I certainly think he’s the best nominee because he delivered on his promises and I think we ought to give him a chance to during, during a second term to deliver on more of those promises.  I’m not here to beat up on any of the other candidates but I think Trump’s gonna win and, and I think he’ll be the best nominee for the Party.”

Former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley announced that she will announce the launch of her 2024 campaign to be the first woman to win the Republican presidential nomination.

Yeah, that’s not a typo.  Per the Charleston Post & Courier, Haley is distributing a “Save the Date” for an announcement on February 15th at a visitor center in Charleston, South Carolina.  Donors are receiving emails saying it will be a “special announcement” regarding the politician’s future and her vision for America.  So 21 months until Election Day 2024, the challenge to the Trump cabal has begun in the Republican Party.

Alina Habba, a Bedminster, New Jersey attorney who shot to the top of Donald Trump’s legal team courtesy of having a law office close to Trump’s golf course and not having high standards, has advised the court that she’s left Trump’s legal team relating to the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, where Trump is accused of raping the journalist in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.

While we don’t know the cause for this–the letter to the judge in the case stresses the move was not made as another Trump maneuver to delay proceedings–but it could be because two weeks ago, she, her fellow counsel and Donald Trump were jointly fined nearly one million dollars for bringing frivolous lawsuits to the federal court.  Last week, Trump dropped another lawsuit he had filed against New York Attorney General Letitia James, a suit on which Habba served as counsel.

Two emperor tamarin monkeys that had somehow escaped their enclosure from the Dallas Zoo were found in the closet of an abandoned home in a town 15 miles away, ending the latest crisis at the Texas facility that sounds like it belongs in Florida, but leading to more questions.

Per the Associated Press, the zoo realized the monkeys were missing Monday morning and found a cut in the animals’ enclosure that would have allowed the monkeys to escape or someone to go into the pen to grab them.  Officials said earlier Monday that they did not believe the monkeys escaped on their own, and the fact that they were both found locked in the same closet a half hour drive from the zoo makes it highly unlikely it’s a monkey version of the blackout drunk night out from “The Hangover Part II.”

This is the third curious occurrence at the Dallas Zoo recently.  A rare species of vulture died of being mysteriously wounded in its enclosure in December.  A small leopard escaped in January through another cut enclosure, wandering free before being found next to its enclosure the following day.  Workers have reported finding other enclosures cut, but did not find any animals missing or harmed.

Three Haitian Americans and a Colombian have been charged by the US Justice Department for their roles in the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse because the Administration has doubts about the ability of the Haitian justice system to properly handle such an important case.

As the New York Times notes, the Haitian government has essentially collapsed since Moïse was killed in a July 7, 2021 assassination allegedly armed by plotters in the United States arming Colombian mercenaries supposedly organized by a former Haitian supreme court judge.  The US has already charged three others in connection with the assassination, but these defendants are considered to be part of the plan’s leadership; the previously indicted individuals helped supply the mercenaries when they arrived on Haiti.

This round, Haitian Americans James Solages and Joseph Vincent, along with Colombian Germán Alejandro Rivera García, were charged with conspiracy to murder Moïse.  Dr. Christian Emmanuel Sanon was charged with smuggling.

A new internal report by Republican National Committee staff plans for the party to build out a permanent “election integrity” infrastructure in all 50 states to challenge every race they lose and continue sustaining the self-created bullshit about widespread “fraud”, the Washington Post reports.

The “National Election Integrity Team” report recommends recruiting local captains to train poll watchers and observers to feed into the paranoid insanity that has fueled a lot of the right wing since fat former President Trump lost in the 2020 election. The plan reportedly acknowledges that the obsession definitely cost them in the Georgia Senate runoffs in 2021, but says the way to address that is to gain more access. “If there is corruption in the election infrastructure, then having Republicans in the system will expose many issues,” the report says as if the GOP had literally any success whatsoever in “exposing fraud” in crucial swing state contests last year.

If any of this sounds familiar… well, no shit it does, but from the RNC specifically, you may remember them coming out publicly with more or less the exact same thing two years ago when they launched an “election integrity committee.” Weird how that didn’t really work, like at all, and Dems managed to gain in the Senate and just barely lose the House, not to mention all the state-level wins, and they’re doing it again instead of just being real with their voters about the need to turn out.

US State Department officials have informed Congress it considers Russia in violation of the New START treaty, the only remaining nuclear agreement between the two nations because it’s blocking inspections within its borders, ABC News reports.

Signed and ratified in 2011, New START allows for up to 18 in-person on-site inspections of facilities to ensure the parties are complying with the limits on nuclear arms produced.  Combined with satellite and remote monitoring–the US runs radiation detection stations at allied nations along the Russian border including Ukraine–the New START treaty was meant to continue bilateral cooperation initiated in the original START treaty signed in 1991 and extended in a series of other agreements.

“Russia is not complying with its obligation under the New START Treaty to facilitate inspection activities on its territory,” a State Department statement said. “Russia’s refusal to facilitate inspection activities prevents the United States from exercising important rights under the treaty and threatens the viability of U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control.”

Since launching his fourth presidential campaign (remember:  he ran, and dropped out, in 2000 as a Reform Party candidate) in November, Donald Trump has struggled to attract donors, raising just $9.5 million for his campaign and a joint Trump-RNC committee, NBC News reports.

Just one week after the GOP suffered an essential loss in the midterms–barely taking the majority in the House and losing a seat in the Senate was far below the outcome of the predicted Red Tsumani–Trump announced his presidential bid with little fanfare outside of his typical outlets.  Trump critics questioned the timing of the launch given the vast majority of his top-ballot candidates failed to win their midterm elections; rumblings within the Party pointed to Trump as the cause of their electoral dysfunction.

Trump likely thought that getting out ahead of the fundraising rush would give him an advantage, but donors appear tired of fundraising drives and skeptical of Trump’s long-term prospects given his ongoing legal troubles and administrative gaffes.  “If you want a big fundraising pop when you announce your campaign, you don’t do it right after an election where all your donors are burned out from being bombarded by fundraising asks and you don’t have a great track record to show for it,” Eric Wilson, a Republican digital fundraising consultant, said.  Marketing genius, Trump is:  beg for money when people are tapped out and switching to holiday spending.  Brilliant.

“Today, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, applauded the selection of West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest to provide the 2023 U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree. The U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree – known as ‘The People’s Tree’ – lights up the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol during the holiday season and is selected from a different national forest each year. Today’s selection kicks off a year-long educational celebration with the theme ‘Endlessly Wild & Wonderful’ to connect people to West Virginia’s public lands.”

“‘The Capitol Christmas Tree is a wonderful, historic tradition that brings our great country together during the holidays, and I am thrilled that the 2023 tree will be from West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest,’ said Senator Joe Manchin, Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. ‘The 2023 Capitol Christmas Tree will represent the wild and wonderful nature of the Mountain State – including our remarkable forestry and wildlife – for the first time since 1976. I’m grateful to the Forest Service for their hard work and partnership on this event, and I look forward to celebrating this honor with my fellow West Virginians,'” says a statement from Manchin’s office.

Wow that’s, uh, a lot of enthusiasm for a tree being cut down. So much so you’d think it was hundreds of trees being cut down to strip mine for coal or something. That Manchin almost certainly didn’t say all those things but instead had a staffer write it is besides the point, he still put his name on this bizarre victory lap over a wild West Virginian tree getting cut down and put on display.

And just like that, the Biden War Mongering Regime is preparing yet another $2.2 BILLION weapons package heading for Ukraine that includes "longer-range" missiles.

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) January 31, 2023

Now this might sound kind of wacky, but what if this guy wants to see Russia destroy the Ukrainian military and subjugate the entire country because Russia pays him? A little far out, right? Still it’s hard to come away from this with any other feeling than that this goes beyond mere reflexive opposition to anything a Democratic president does but like he’s actually getting paid by the Kremlin to type this kind of shit on Twitter because of his influence. Crazy stuff, we know, but like, what if the Russians have identified Kirk as someone with a great deal of influence over the “grassroots” of the American right and are paying him to espouse an ostensibly “anti-war” message to build momentum against US military support for Ukraine? That sure would be something else, right?

The unnamed staffer for Herschel Walker’s campaign who sued CPAC chief Matt Schlapp for sexual assault has filed a second lawsuit against Republican operative Caroline Wren for defamation after Wren identified the accuser in multiple tweets calling him a “habitual liar,” Politico reports.

The accuser seeks $500,000 in damages from Wren, who was a key player in the “Stop the Steal” rally immediately before the Capitol riot and recently ran both Kari Lake and Harmeet Dhillon’s failed campaigns for Arizona governor and Republican National Committee chair, respectively.

“I like Mr Jordan, but he should do what he has said he’ll do and what we demand of him. If he doesn’t, he’ll be turned on by Republicans as fast as they did on dizzy lizzy chaney [sic]”

– The current top comment on the Fox News article “Conservatives worry GOP will go soft on Big Tech after Jim Jordan’s surprise committee decision,” posted Tuesday. Dumb story short, Jim Jordan picked Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie to lead the House Antitrust Committee instead of Colorado Congressman Ken Buck, which isn’t sitting well with the fanboys as they see Buck as one to actually take action against Big Tech over “censorship” while Massie would just talk a lot of shit and do nothing, leading them to suspect Jordan might be in the tech giants’ pocket.

The article quotes right wing activist Mike Davis of the Internet Accountability Project complaining about the choice, but only tamely criticizing Jordan. Probably smart on Fox News’s part because if they printed Davis as saying that Jordan “talks a big game… He pretends he’s fighting Big Tech publicly, but does their bidding behind the scenes. He needs to be exposed. He’s a pretty cheap legislator to buy,” like he did on Steve Bannon’s show just a few months ago then they might be doing some serious damage to Jordan’s brand among the MAGA faithful.