-Marjorie Taylor Greene, grammar NOT-zi

Disgraced former president Donald Trump isn’t getting much help from the courts or his prison-shy former aides in his attempts to hide January 6 evidence from House investigators, but all he needs to do is run out the clock. Based on a quick glance at the clock, he seems to be well on his way.
 

• Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has agreed to cooperate with the January 6 committee, at least to some degree, after previously defying his subpoenas. (What a difference an indicted Steve Bannon makes!) Meadows will fork over requested documents and appear for a deposition, though it’s entirely possible that he’ll show up to avoid contempt charges only to repeatedly holler “executive privilege” when the panel questions him.
   
• Bannon’s arrest may have finally spooked Meadows into compliance, but other key holdouts remain. The committee will vote Wednesday to hold former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who has also refused to testify on fabricated executive-privilege grounds, in criminal contempt. Clark was actively involved in Trump’s efforts to get the DOJ to help him overturn the election, and his testimony might implicate Trump in criminal conduct—but if and when he’s prosecuted for contempt, it will take time for his case to wind through the courts.
   
• The good news is that the courts continue to find Trump’s executive privilege claim to be, in legal terms, a “load of hooey.”  A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard arguments Tuesday in Trump’s endeavor to block House investigators from receiving his White House records from the National Archives, and seemed poised to reject his request once again. “We have one president at a time under our Constitution,” Judge Patricia Millett said, in a decent encapsulation of the looniness of this fight.

As House investigators wait to get their hands on internal records, new evidence of Trump’s past and future coup attempts continues to pile up.
 

• Trump himself made several calls to his aides at the Willard hotel hours before the attack on the Capitol and pressed them about alternative ways to stop the certification of the election results without the assistance of then-Vice President Mike Pence, according to a new Guardian report. Those calls both establish a direct line between the White House and the Coup Command Center and show that Trump’s goals that day were in total alignment with those of the neck-bearded rioters, making them of particular interest to investigators.
  
  Meanwhile, Trump allies are still hard at work replacing election officials at all levels across the country, from secretaries of state down to volunteer poll watchers. Big Lie candidates won races to become local voting judges and inspectors in two Pennsylvania communities this month, local GOP leaders in Michigan have appointed election deniers to election-canvassing boards, and a Republican on Philadelphia’s election board who defended the integrity of the election will resign in January after a year of violent threats from Trump supporters. 

Trump’s plans to steal the next election depend on suppressing the most damning evidence of his attack on democracy until the 2021 midterms, when Republicans can regain the House and shut down the investigation, while removing the human roadblocks that stood in his way the first time. It’s up to House investigators and the Justice Department to push forward as quickly as possible, and it’s up to us to build a better clock: votesaveamerica.com/nooffyears.

Join us on December 7th for What A Year: Crooked’s end of year livestream event featuring your favorite Crooked hosts, special guests, and more! We'll also be raising money for our No Off Years fund to support voter registration efforts in places where reaching new voters will help make the difference in our ability to maintain majorities in the House and Senate next year. So tune in live for the What a Year livestream on Tuesday, December 7th at 5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern! To RSVP, head to crooked.com/whatayear.

The Omicron variant had already been in western Europe for at least a week when countries began banning flights from southern Africa, according to Dutch officials. It’s not yet clear if the Dutch Omicron cases from November 19 and 23 were people who had been to southern Africa. Brazil and Japan have also reported their first cases. The bad news: This thing is already everywhere, including here, probably—the U.S. still has inferior virus-surveillance systems. The very tentative, anecdotal good news:  Of the 44 total cases reported by the European Union, all of them are mild or asymptomatic. That might prove to be because only younger people have gotten sick so far, or just be the early stage of a worse disease; it’s too early to heave a sigh of relief, but there’s every reason to remain calm.

• A 15-year-old opened fire at his Michigan high school on Tuesday, killing at least three students and wounding eight other people. The shooter has been taken into custody.
   
• FDA advisors have narrowly recommended authorization for Merck’s COVID pill.
   
• A video from September shows another instance of Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) suggesting Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) was a terrorist. Boebert called Omar on Monday, ostensibly to apologize for her Islamophobic remarks, but doubled down instead. 
   
• CNN has (finally) suspended anchor Chris Cuomo indefinitely, after newly released text messages showed that he was more actively involved in helping then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) fend off sexual misconduct allegations than previously known. 
   
• Dr. Oz has jumped into the GOP Pennsylvania Senate primary, just in case any Pennsylvania voters happen to be looking for a New Jersey resident who doesn’t give a shit if their kids die. 
   
• A new court filing revealed that Mark Zuckerberg was deposed by the SEC in the 2019 Cambridge Analytica investigation, which might explain why Meta has postponed its shiny new stock ticker.
   
• A Tuscaloosa County, AL, judge prohibited striking coal miners from picketing outside their employer’s properties, in a rare order that the United Mine Workers of America says violates both federal labor law and the Constitution. 
   
• Former Kyiv Post journalists have launched a new publication, the Kyiv Independent, after the Post’s owner abruptly shut down operations earlier this month.
   
• The first robots made of living cells have figured out how to reproduce. Look, we had a good run. 
   
• Dozens of people who went to see an Oasis tribute band (“Noasis”) at a U.K. pub were snowed in for days; they have since been found caught beneath the landslide.

Fresh off of their multi-year fight to deny people health care for purely political reasons, Republican lawmakers in several states are gearing up to hobble President Biden’s universal pre-K proposal in exactly the same way. The plan in the Build Back Better Act would provide $110 billion in federal funding for states to offer free prekindergarten to all three- and four-year-olds, but states will have to participate by putting in additional funds to create or expand state programs. Republicans don’t intend to let that happen across the board: GOP lawmakers in Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Minnesota, Texas, and Arizona have either criticized the plan, or flat out said they’ll reject it. Some Democratic lawmakers have their own concerns about the federal funding’s looming expiration date (thanks, Joe Manchin), but we’re largely looking at Republicans dusting off the ol’ Obamacare playbook, this time to screw over parents and young kids.

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Pfizer has requested authorization of its booster shot for teens ages 16 and 17.

Amazon workers in Bessemer, AL, will likely get another shot at unionizing.

Barbados has become a parliamentary republic, cutting its final ties with its colonial past, and also declared Rihanna a national hero for good measure.

Josephine Baker has become the first Black woman to be honored at the Panthéon in Paris.