Our long national nightmare is…not over.
 

• Last week’s indictment of disgraced former president Donald Trump brought to light a previously-unknown internal campaign memo, which laid out the Trump campaign’s scheme to use fraudulent electors to steal the 2020 election. The details of the memo remain unclear, but what is known is that one of Trump’s lawyers, Kenneth Chesebro, acknowledged from the outset that he was proposing “a bold, controversial strategy” to install Trump into a second term that the Supreme Court would “likely” reject. 
   

• Nonetheless, Chesebro argued that even if his strategy was legally porous, it would achieve two strategic goals: focus national attention on false claims of voter fraud and “buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column.” This memo fills in a big missing piece in the public record, documenting Trump’s allies role in developing and organizing the fraudulent-electors scheme—a piece of evidence the House January 6 committee had not been able to find. 
   

• The plan was for the false Trump electors to vote in mid-December, 2020, as if Trump (rather than Biden) had won their states, complete with fraudulent documentation, and then on January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence would count those fabricated votes, rather than the certified, official votes for Biden. We’ve known the contours of that plan for many months now, but the memo provides more explicit details about the plan’s origin and how it was internally discussed by Trump’s White House associates. The memo illustrates what federal prosecutors say was a criminal plot to engineer “a fake controversy that would derail the proper certification,” of the election results.

Of all facets of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, the false electors scheme was certainly the largest-scale endeavor, but he had many more. 
 

• According to court documents unsealed on Wednesday, Justice Department prosecutors investigating the failed coup for Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant early this year for Trump’s now-defunct Twitter account. This is the first known instance of prosecutors directly searching Trump’s digital communications and points to just how far-reaching the special counsel’s investigation has been, (though we still don’t know what those communications contained). Twitter shut down Trump’s account for nearly two years after the January 6 insurrection, but it was reinstated when right-wing billionaire Elon Musk took over the company last fall.
   

• The documents indicate that DOJ prosecutors received permission from the judge who signed the warrant (and who was concerned Trump might be a flight risk) to withhold the fact that they had obtained it for several months, fearing that if Trump learned about the inquiry, he would freak the fuck out and “seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior,” or notify his accomplices. Twitter, now called “X” because Elon Musk is an illiterate gargoyle, did not comply with the search warrant in a timely manner, which earned them a $350,000 fine. 
   

I don’t know about you but I’m starting to think this Trump guy is corrupt or something. 

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Ohio voters dealt a decisive blow to Issue 1, a ballot measure backed by the anti-choice right which would have raised the voter threshold for state constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60 percent. This gives pro-choice voters a fighting chance to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution in November’s special election. Issue 1 failed to win majorities even in counties Trump won convincingly in 2020—the latest in an unbroken streak of crushing defeats for anti-abortion forces, proving that even in red states, the GOP is at odds with the electorate on abortion rights. Pro-choice voters turn out in droves even when abortion is indirectly on the ballot, as in the case of Issue 1, and even in off-cycle elections, which used to favor Republicans. Ohio drew national attention after the Dobbs decision when a 10-year-old rape victim from the state was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion last year due to a 2019 state law banning the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape and incest. If the state votes in November to enshrine abortion rights into the Buckeye State’s constitution, that law will be nullified.

A man in Utah was fatally shot during an FBI raid of his house in connection with an investigation into alleged threats against President Biden and others. The man—who had been under federal investigation since April—apparently made indications online that he was planning to take physical action. 

Related: A Reuters special report determined that political violence in the United States is at its highest point since the 1970’s.

President Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday aimed at reducing the flow of American investment into a limited group of Chinese firms that the White House suspects may be funding the country’s military ambitions. 

Former Vice President Mike Pence has qualified for the August 23 Republican primary debate. Mother must be so proud!

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) fired a second democratically-elected county prosecutor on Wednesday, after accusing her of being “soft on crime,” and put a Republican prosecutor in her place. 

School districts across Florida are dropping course offerings for Advanced Placement Psychology due to the discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity. Cool! Good stuff!

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) fell in her home on Tuesday—here we go again! Her office tried to downplay the incident as a “minor” fall for which she was “briefly” hospitalized, but her staff has not announced when she will return to the Senate. Feinstein, who is 90 years old, has often appeared confused and disoriented since returning from a monthslong absence earlier this year when she was hospitalized with shingles. 

Several major wildfires in Hawaii have forced mass evacuations and widespread power outages, particularly on the island of Maui. The U.S. Coast Guard has rescued at least 12 people who fled into the ocean to avoid the engulfing smoke and flames.

Medicaid expansion was one of the major tenants of the pandemic-era safety net, with one-in-four Americans insured by the program during that period. But with the public-health emergency mostly over, states across the country and across the political spectrum are kicking millions of low-income enrollees off the program. In just the past three months, nearly 4 million Americans have been removed from Medicaid rolls, a figure expected to swell to more than 15 million by this time next year. The mass termination of health coverage will amount to the largest shift in the health insurance landscape since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Biden administration officials say that they’ve pressured states to correct errors and minimize coverage losses. GOP-led states like Arkansas and Texas have been the most aggressive in cutting residents from Medicaid, but the White House has been hesitant to criticize them for fear of damaging relationships, which has drawn ire from congressional Democrats. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who chairs the committee that oversees Medicaid, did not mince words, saying “Everybody’s got to be more forceful. This is morally repugnant, what’s being done to these poor people.” With many voters already unconvinced that they are economically better-off under President Biden than they were before, an expanding pool of uninsured Americans could be politically perilous for him ahead of the 2024 election.

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Entrance fees at all national parks in the United States will be waived on Friday in honor of the anniversary of the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act.

Barbie is the first film by a solo female director to earn over $1 billion in ticket sales.