Another hot update on the sham GOP House investigations—strap in!
 

• The inaugural hearings before the new GOP-led House committee investigating the “weaponization” of the federal government (give us a fucking break) are not going as planned for Republicans. The first three witnesses to testify privately before the committee have offered little firsthand knowledge or evidence of any wrongdoing or violation of the law according to Democrats on the panel who have listened to their depositions. The three, instead, appear to be a group of aggrieved former FBI officials who have trafficked in right-wing conspiracy theories, including about the January 6 insurrection, and received financial support from a top ally of disgraced former president Donald Trump, Kash Patel. 

• Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee fleshed out some of their conspiracy theories in a 316-page report released last night. The witnesses have promoted dissolving the FBI, cited baseless claims that the January 6 insurrection was planned by Democrats, made Nazi allusions, and claimed that rioter Ashli Babbitt was murdered. According to the report, one witness suggested that it would be better for Americans to die than to have any kind of domestic intelligence-gathering program. 
   

• Official government-oversight reports have described FBI investigations into right-wing extremism and White nationalist terror threats as “woefully inadequate.”  Most recently, new reports reveal that the Justice Department clashed with the FBI for months over how aggressively to probe Trump for stealing classified documents from the White House to take to his private residence, with senior FBI officials on the case angling to drop the investigation entirely before the August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists have other friends in high places, as well.
 

• A member of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s senior staff met this week with Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer when she breached a set of doors just outside the House chamber during the January 6 insurrection. Babbitt’s mother also met briefly with House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer. These meetings with Babbitt’s mother and relatives of the January 6 defendants underscore the new House majority’s overt sympathy to traitors who tried to overthrow democracy. Cool! Good stuff!
   

• Other House Republicans took meetings with supporters and relatives of January 6 defendants as well, including, you guessed it, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Greene told CBS News “We’re actually looking at doing oversight of the D.C. jail,” where dozens of January 6 defendants are being held in pretrial detention. Retired Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonnell, who was injured during the Capitol attack, criticized McCarthy for allowing his staff to meet with Babbitt’s mother, saying, “It’s a total betrayal of what I risked my life for on Jan. 6.”

It’s clear that the FBI has a right-wing extremist problem, and so does the House of Representatives, but elected Democrats could actually start to fix the former issue if they wanted to. FBI Director Christopher Wray is a Trump appointee, and will serve out the rest of his ten-year term until 2027, because President Biden didn’t have the good sense to fire him the minute he was sworn in. Republicans would have cried “Saturday Night Massacre” in bad faith for a few weeks, but that’s better than having the guy who regularly goes on Fox News to pander to the far-right leading the nation’s largest domestic law-enforcement bureau. Democrats defer to Republicans on “crime” too often. It’s why all of our modern Democratic presidents have chosen Republicans to head the FBI, it’s why President Biden is siding with the GOP in nullifying the District of Columbia’s new criminal code. Elected Democrats need to stop running away from the crime bogeymen like scared children, especially because Republicans are so clearly faking it when they pretend to care about law and order. 

South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murders of his wife and son. 

The pandemic-era additional aid available through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) came to an end on Wednesday, threatening the estimated 31 million low-income Americans who rely on the program. 

Amazon has paused construction on its second headquarters in Virginia amid the company’s largest-ever layoffs, and reassessment of work-from-home protocols. 

Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights activist Ales Bialiatski was sentenced to 10 years in prison today by a court in his native Belarus for “financing protests” in a trial condemned by the E.U. as a “sham.”

Anti-fascist investigators have identified Dallas Erin Humber as one of the main propagandists behind the neo-Nazi outfit The Terrorgram Collective. Humber lives in Sacramento, CA, and in addition to slinging homicidal White Nationalist bile, appears to have been a dildo saleswoman. Girlboss alert!!

A police officer and a civilian were killed during violent protests in Bogota, Colombia, on Thursday where members of rural and indigenous communities blocked access to an oil field and set a fire to demand corporate giant Emerald Energy help fix roads.

Online counseling service BetterHelp has agreed to return $7.8 million to customers to settle with the Federal Trade Commission after an investigation found that the company shared data it had promised to keep private.

Russian troops and mercenaries shelled the last access routes to the besieged Ukrainian city of Bakhmut today, bringing the Kremlin closer to its first major victory in over six months after the bloodiest period of the war thus far. A bridge in the adjacent town of Khromove was damaged by Russian tank fire. Ukrainian soldiers were working to repair damaged roads, and additional troops were heading toward the frontline in a show that they are not prepared to surrender, and additional Ukrainians were digging new trenches for defensive positions. Russia has spent the last few months encircling the city of 70,000 they hope to take as a prize after a costly winter offensive.

The Willow Project is a disastrous Western Arctic drilling plan that could generate as much carbon as 76 coal plants emit in a year, jeopardize the health and traditional practices of nearby Alaska Native communities, and devastate local wildlife like polar bears, migratory birds, and caribou. Help us stop the Willow project.
 

ConocoPhillips is planning this massive oil drilling project in the Western Arctic, and the Biden administration has less than 30 days to finalize its decision to grant or deny permits to ConocoPhillips. You can pressure the administration to do the right thing. Tell President Biden to halt it for good.

The influx of funding for the IRS is resulting in—get this—a functioning tax service. 

Nearly 60 years after he was first recommended for the United States’ highest military honor, retired Col. Paris Davis, one of the first Black officers to lead a Special Forces team, finally received the Medal of Honor today for his exemplary service in the Vietnam War.