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Biden White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain will step down some time within the next few weeks pending a replacement being picked, the New York Times reports, characterizing the coming exit as a matter of simple burnout after a grueling two years than any sort of internal turmoil.

Klain already lasted longer than any of Trump’s four chiefs of staff, each of them (save for Mark Meadows) fired by Donald after telling him too much of what he didn’t want to hear, and Meadows going down with the ship after the humiliating loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Possible choices to succeed Klain include Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, former COVID czar Jeff Zients, White House domestic policy adviser Susan Rice, counselor Steve Richetti, and former Delaware Governor Jack Markell, and senior adviser Anita Dunn.

Is Joe Biden a foreign agent?
The evidence is overwhelming.
Don’t miss my show tonight on Fox at 9p ET where I’ll prove it to you.

— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) January 21, 2023

Just walk through this: Dan Bongowongo has evidence that “proves” the President is a foreign agent but you’ll only see it if you watch his show at 9:00 on a Saturday night.

A revelation that would bring America to its knees isn’t coming now but more than seven hours from now. Call us cynical but we don’t think Bongowongo is going to prove jack shit.

Former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s “election fraud” investigation unit, a Potemkin village built to address the “concerns” of dipshit Republican voters who buy into fantasies of mass election fraud which ended up bringing just 20 cases against individuals in its four years of existence (plus a single instance of a dead person voting in 2020), will now be repurposed to defend voter access under the leadership of new Dem AG Kris Mayes to protect election workers from harassment and defending the right of Arizonans to vote by mail, the Guardian reports.

You will not be surprised to learn that the MAGAverse’s latest Hunter Biden “evidence”, the “$49,910 monthly rent to Joe,” turns out to be a load of bullshit, according to a new Washington Post report.

https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1615510307908251648

Best we can summarize what actually happened is this: In 2018 Hunter had an assistant fill out a rental application for a luxury apartment complex in Los Angeles. The assistant listed Joe Biden’s Wilmington home as the “current address” and “Owasco PC” the name of a company he owns as the “current residence” for some reason. The assistant wrote “$49,910” under the “monthly rent” field for Owasco PC. That figure was not the amount Hunter was paying to live at Owasco PC, but what Owasco PC was paying quarterly to rent office space at the Swedish House, a property in the Georgetown area of DC, also home to the Swedish Embassy to the United States.

• Happy Second Anniversary to the Biden Administration.  And thank you for returning some degree of normalcy to one branch of the federal government as Republicans look to destroy a different one.  
• The same people who tout Donald Trump as a spectacular businessman for leveraging debt are refusing to raise the debt ceiling on the federal budget because they think the government should balance its budget like a household checkbook, demonstrating their knowledge of business and economics is extremely suspect.
• It’s difficult to identify a culprit when you’re prevented from interviewing the most likely suspects under oath (or even the possibility of prosecution for lying to investigators).  Supreme Court justices are the most privileged class in the US, holding themselves above the law.
• Republicans:  elected county sheriffs can unilaterally decide what laws to enforce.  Also Republicans:  elected county prosecutors cannot decide to not prosecute under any circumstances (even though they know specifics of the cases and the law) because law and order.  
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CV”

It’s the convergence of QAnon crazy.  Scores of conspiracy nuts will converge on Trump’s Doral property–scoring a major gig and the easiest commensurate commission for whatever soulless group salesperson the call from the meeting organizer who was going to a Trump property regardless of price–headlined by Mike Lindell, Mike Flynn, and a variety of other acts you’d only know if you were so far down the QAnon rabbit hole you have worms coming out your eyes.

The Marshal for the US Supreme Court, Gail Curley, released a four-sentence statement Friday to address concerns that the report her office released did not state investigators interviewed the nine Supreme Court Justices or their spouses in the course of the eight-month probe.  Unfortunately, her statement leaves a lot to be desired:  while she says all justices cooperated fully, she does not say they interviewed the Justices’ spouses–including the infamously loose-lipped Ginny Thomas, who is also implicated in the planning of the January 6th coup attempt.  Nor, she says, did the Justices themselves sign sworn affidavits because, she says, no one implicated the Justices and no leads led to the Justices, she says.

It should be pointed out at this moment that the Marshal of the Supreme Court is not an investigatory position; its stated duties include overseeing the operation of the Court building and making sure witnesses and attorneys appearing before the Court are on time.  Unlike the Secret Service or the Capitol Police, both of which have protective and investigatory units, the duties of the Marshal end at the Courthouse doors and do not include criminal investigations.  It is not, as some conservatives have characterized it, part of the US Marshal Service.

In a trial focusing on potential manipulation of the stock market, billionaire anarchist Elon Musk declared that he doesn’t believe everything that he tweets as a factual statement, a habit he claims that should mean investors shouldn’t pay attention to what he says.

According to Reuters, Musk took the stand in the securities class action suit that accuses Musk of lying to impact the stock price of Tesla, the electric car company Musk also controls.  Investors and Tesla stock owners have sued claiming that Musk’s 2018 tweet that he was going to take the company private was a crass attempt to increase the value of Musk’s personal holdings at the expense of the free market.  Musk countered by claiming investors take his statements too seriously:  “Just because I tweet something does not mean people believe it or will act accordingly.”

After Musk’s August 7, 2018 post in which he said, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,” the stock fluctuated in the day’s trading, with trading volume doubling on the stock and the price jumping to $387 per share; prior to the tweet, the stock was trading in the low $300-range.

Justice Department lawyers have informed spandex-wearing grapple freak Jim Jordan that the DOJ is under no legal obligation to cooperate with spittle tirades as he launches his new “Weaponization” select subcommittee probes of ongoing federal criminal investigations, Politico reports.

“Consistent with longstanding policy and practice, any oversight requests must be weighed against the Department’s interests in protecting the integrity of its work,” wrote DOJ legislative affairs chief Carlos Uriarte in the five-page letter. “Longstanding Department policy prevents us from confirming or denying the existence of pending investigations in response to congressional requests or providing non-public information about our investigations.” It’s not clear if Jordan has looked into Uriarte yet to see if his sister-in-law donated $20 to Hillary Clinton in 2008 or whatever yet.

Republican politicians and party operatives during the Trump years had a convenient excuse to questions about why they seemed to spend so much time and more importantly money hanging out at the now-former Trump International Hotel in the historic Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Ave in DC: That it was conveniently located (which we guess makes it a “meta-convenient” excuse).

So now that it’s a Waldorf-Astoria branded property, and that we already gave away this gist in the headline anyway, you will not be surprised to learn that a new report from the watchdogs at Citizens for Responsiblity and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has found that Republican spending of donor funds absolutely cratered since Donald sold off his figurative – and arguably literal – whorehouse.

CREW compared the five month period leading up to the midterms at the new Waldorf-Astoria in 2022 with the same period at the Trump International in 2018 and found that the Republican campaign expenditures reported to the FEC dropped by a staggering 99.97 percent, or $867,000 down to less than $2,000. Now obviously there would have been at least some hit to the spending if Trump had held on to the hotel. One can allow that Republicans are naturally going to spend less at a joint right across the street from a Republican White House than one across the street from a Democratic White House – no matter who owns the place – but not almost literally 100% less. It’s too bad that CREW didn’t try to nail down another window between when Trump left office and when it was first reported he was looking to sell in September 2021, but we understand if that would’ve been too hard to frame given the still ongoing COVID spikes that year. That’s inconvenient to us.

In an email obtained by NBC News, a North Dakota Republican National Committee delegate on Friday called out fellow delegate Tamara Scott, the Chair of the “RNC Faith Advisory Board” and a close ally of Chairwoman Ronna Not-Romney McDaniel, over a private conversation they had in which Scott had questioned if Not-Romney’s rival in next week’s chair election, MAGA lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, was right for the job “because of Harmeet’s Sikh beliefs – she is not a Christian.”

“On Wednesday, December 28th I called Tamara Scott, Chair of the RNC Faith Advisory Board, because I had felt bad for having missed the weekly prayer calls in recent weeks and wanted to discuss them with her. When the subject of the RNC Chair race came up, Tamara told me she was backing Ronna McDaniel and I told her I was backing Harmeet Dhillon. What should have been a pleasant conversation among colleagues discussing the merits of each candidate then took a very ugly turn when Tamara told me that she and others at the RNC were ‘worried the gains made by the Faith Advisory Board would be in jeopardy should Harmeet Dhillon win the RNC Chair race.'”

A Florida federal judge on Friday ruled that Napoleonic autocrat Governor Ron DeSantis violated the state constitution last August when he suspended Tampa-area Hillsborough County State’s Attorney Andrew Warren for being “woke” and refusing to enforce state laws criminalizing abortion, but lacks jurisdiction to reinstate Warren under the 11th Amendment proscription on federal courts “awarding declaratory or injunctive relief against a state official based only on a violation of state law.”

“The Governor violated the First Amendment by considering Mr. Warren’s speech on matters of public concern – the four FJP policies save one sentence – as motivating factors in the decision to suspend him. The Governor violated the First Amendment by considering Mr. Warren’s association with the Democratic Party and alleged association with Mr. Soros as motivating factors in the decision. But the Governor would have made the same decision anyway, even without considering these things. The First Amendment violations were not essential to the outcome and so do not entitle Mr. Warren to relief in this action. The suspension also violated the Florida Constitution, and that violation did affect the outcome. But the Eleventh Amendment prohibits a federal court from awarding declaratory or injunctive relief of the kind at issue against a state official based only on a violation of state law,” wrote Northern District of Florida Circuit Judge Robert Hinkle in the ruling.

In a video message that hasn’t been posted yet but previewed to Politico, disgraced former President Trump ordered House Republicans to leave Social Security and Medicare entitlements out of their hostage negotiations over the looming federal debt ceiling breach, calculating correctly that such moves will be politically suicidal for the party and he himself ahead of 2024.

“Cut waste, fraud and abuse everywhere that we can find it and there is plenty there’s plenty of it. But do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save Social Security, don’t destroy it,” says the Orange God Emperor in the video message directed at the Freedom Caucasians eager to set the global economy on fire. Why Trump thinks they’re going to listen to him now is anyone’s guess. They went out of their way to willfully disobey his orders to stand down during the Speaker shitshow and only let Kevin McCarthy win the gavel after he acquiesced to their insane demands, showing how little control he still holds over the House GOP.

One day after US District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks slapped him and his lawyers with more than $930,000 in fines for bringing a frivolous lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others, Donald Trump has withdrawn a civil lawsuit Trump filed against New York Attorney General Letitia James to harass her for bringing a $250 million lawsuit against him and his company. The suit had originally been filed in a Florida state court but James successfully argued to get it transferred to the federal circuit where it landed in front of – you guessed it – US District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks. It’s unknown if Trump did this unilaterally or if his lawyers pleaded with him to help save their bank accounts, but it’s hard to see the timing being coincidental.

Free speech crusader Elon Musk banned the official government Twitter account for Congressman George Santos due to an unspecified rules violation on Friday. It’s not clear what the final transgression was for the lying piece of shit MAGA Republican but it must’ve been good. Santos’s personal/campaign account remains active, which is a switch from the pre-Musk Twitter bans of fat former President Trump and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene in which their official government accounts remained active (though the @POTUS account was locked until Trump left office). Musk restored both of the white nationalists’ accounts after taking over.

UPDATE 1/20/2023 10:19 AM EST: Holy shit, the account is suspended again after being inexplicably restored as of 9:45 AM EST Friday. We were able to confirm that it was a “government official account” when it was active again, but who the hell knows what’s going on here.

Kremlin-connected American businessman Andrew Intrater, cousin of sanctioned Putin crony Viktor Vekselberg and subject of various investigations surrounding the 2016 election, tells the New York Times he’s been in touch with the SEC about the $625,000 he dumped into a Ponzi scheme account managed by now-Congressman George “Kitara” Santos in May 2021, six months after Santos had lost his first House election to a Democrat on Long Island’s North Shore.

Again, Intrater is a guy who’s been suspected of funneling blood Russian money into Trump’s 2017 inauguration committee, and the New York Times appears to be simply taking his word for it, even printing a quote from him saying “I don’t want Republicans having a bum representing Republicans, and I don’t want to have a guy that committed crimes walking free.” What the fuck?

At least two US-allied Syrian opposition fighters were wounded in a suspected Iranian kamikaze drone strike on an American military base in eastern Syria on Friday, the Associated Press reports.

No Americans were injured in the strike. “Attacks of this kind are unacceptable – they place our troops and our partners at risk and jeopardize the fight against ISIS,” said a US military spokesman.

As has been expected for months, Arizona Dem Congressman Ruben Gallego will on Monday officially launch his challenge to edgelord incumbent Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Newsweek reports.

Campaigning to keep her job, RNC chairwoman Ronna Not-Romney McDaniel told party delegates this week that she’s the one up to the tough task of talking disgraced former President Trump out of forming a third party if he loses the 2024 presidential nomination, the Washington Post reports.