-Donald Trump's new lawyer, on his high school consolation prize

Ukraine has accused Russian peace negotiators of lying their faces off, while Russian President Vladimir Putin has discovered that his own advisors lied their faces off, right to his lying face. Here’s the latest:
 

• Ukrainian officials said Wednesday that Russian forces had continued to bombard Kyiv and Chernihiv, a day after Russia pledged at peace talks to “drastically reduce” the intensity of its attacks on those areas. Russian officials sent mixed messages about whether there had been progress in the negotiations, with the Kremlin’s spokesperson saying they hadn’t produced anything “very promising.” 
   
• Russia’s bullshit isn’t only directed outwards. U.S. intelligence officials have found that Putin’s advisors have been misinforming him about both the military’s struggles in Ukraine because they were too scared to tell him the truth, the White House said on Wednesday. Putin is now aware that he’s been getting bad information, according to declassified U.S. intelligence, and it’s caused persistent tension between him and senior military officials.
   
• With Putin showing no sign of wrapping up his (literally) ill-advised invasion, President Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky on a Wednesday that the U.S. will provide Ukraine with an additional $500 million in direct aid. More than four million refugees have now fled Ukraine, according to the U.N. refugee agency, with 2.3 million crossing into Poland. Children make up half of all refugees from the war, according to UNICEF.

Meanwhile, Kremlin propagandists can’t help but feel that this would all be going better if America still had a Putin-friendly president who loved lying his face off.
 

• Russian state-TV host Evgeny Popov said it was time for the Russian people to call on Americans to “change the regime in the U.S…. and to again help our partner Trump to become president.” While Donald Trump publicly begs Putin to make up some dirt on Hunter Biden, Kremlin propagandists have helpfully promoted a bonkers conspiracy theory about Hunter funding secret Pentagon bioweapons labs in Ukraine, which was brought to their attention by freelance Kremlin propagandist Tucker Carlson.
   
• Far from condemning Trump for soliciting foreign interference in an American election yet again, Republicans have either shrugged or co-signed the effort. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) said of Putin, “I don’t know if he has dirt on Biden. If he does, he should reveal it, but he is a war criminal so I don’t expect that he’s right now sitting around thinking about ways that he can reveal other information.” Putin is a war criminal, whom we forcefully condemn and also openly invite to align with our political party by smearing our opponents. Good stuff!

It’s another measure of how poorly the war has gone for Russia that Putin’s advisors were terrified to tell him the truth about it. The Kremlin certainly seems to think it would face fewer obstacles with Donald Trump (and by extension, Republicans) in power; that assessment, if nothing else, is worth trusting.

This week Jamel Johnson, Damon Young, and Aaron Edwards join host Jason Concepcion and producer Ryan Wallerson in a new edition of Take Survivor! They discuss the best all-time underdogs, video games that should be movies, and Oscar snubs. Subscribe to the Takeline YouTube channel to never miss an episode.

Democratic leaders haven’t shown much of an appetite to hold Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accountable for presiding over cases about a coup attempt in which his wife was actively involved. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a Tuesday caucus meeting that “it’s up to an individual justice to decide to recuse himself if his wife is participating in a coup,” implying that it’s not up to Congress to investigate or impeach that justice when he refuses. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that “the information we know right now raises serious questions about how close Justice Thomas and his wife were to the planning and execution of the insurrection,” without suggesting that the answers might merit consequences. While top Democrats politely ask Thomas to please recuse himself in the future, Republicans have aggressively and shamelessly defended him: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday called the demands for his recusal an “inappropriate pressure campaign” designed to “delegitimize the Supreme Court.”

• President Biden on Wednesday urged Congress to approve more COVID-relief funding, announced the rollout of COVID.gov to help Americans access resources, and received his second booster shot on camera. 
   
• Gov. Doug Ducey (R-AZ) has signed a 15-week abortion ban, as well as bills limiting gender-affirming health-care and sports participation for transgender kids.
   
• Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said she’ll support Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court, ensuring the confirmation vote will be bipartisan.
   
• Jared Kushner is expected to appear before the January 6 committee on Thursday for a voluntary interview. The White House said Tuesday that it won’t invoke executive privilege over his or Ivanka Trump’s testimony. 
   
• The families of Sandy Hook shooting victims have rejected Alex Jones’s $120,000-per-plaintiff settlement offer, calling it a “transparent and desperate attempt by Alex Jones to escape a public reckoning under oath with his deceitful, profit-driven campaign against the plaintiffs and the memory of their loved ones lost at Sandy Hook.
   
• A Palestinian gunman shot and killed five people in a suburb of Tel Aviv on Tuesday night, the third deadly attack in Israel within a week. 
   
• A Georgia Senate committee has gutted a GOP bill to overhaul state elections, after Georgia election officials from both parties vehemently opposed it. 
   
• A Washington Post review of Hunter Biden’s deals with a Chinese energy company found no evidence that President Biden personally benefited from them, or even knew about them in detail.
   
• House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy met with Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) over his claims that his colleagues were orgy-having coke fiends. McCarthy said that Cawthorn had lost his trust, a line that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) evidently didn’t cross by speaking at a white-nationalist conference. 
   
• It appears that CBS hired former Trump aide Mick Mulvaney in order to gain "access," on the expectation that Republicans will win big in the midterms. Glad we cleared that up!!!!!
   
• Bruce Willis will step away from acting after being diagnosed with aphasia, his family said Wednesday. 
   
• Pink Floyd, a flamingo who escaped from a Kansas zoo in 2005, has turned up in Texas, and absolutely nobody can stop you from picturing him in a little cowboy hat.

Today in Weird, Looks Like The Name Change Didn’t Fix It, Meta has been paying Targeted Victory, a top GOP consulting firm, to help turn the public against TikTok. Losing users for the first time and desperate to deflect attention away from its own toxicity and legal troubles, Facebook hired the firm to portray TikTok as a danger to American children through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign. That included placing op-eds in major news outlets, promoting stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually burbled up from the Facebook swamps, and enlisting local politicians to the anti-TikTok cause. In one email, a Targeted Victory director wrote that the firm needed to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using.” It’s telling, if not at all surprising, that Meta turned to one of the biggest recipients of GOP campaign spending to get the job done.

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The Biden administration is expected to lift Title 42, the Trump-era border policy that’s left asylum-seekers stranded in Mexico for over two years, in late May.

A nasal spray that prevents COVID infection could be available within the next six months, according to Cornell University researchers. 

Texas A&M announced it will cover the tuition, fees, and living expenses of its Ukrainian students. 

A nationwide switch to electric vehicles could prevent 110,000 pollution-related deaths over the next 30 years, according to the American Lung Association.