Trump: Letting Congress Investigate Jan. 6 Violates the Sanctity of the Office I Shat on Daily for Four Years

One of the saddest things about Donald Trump’s continued attempt to block Congress from obtaining records detailing exactly what he was doing before, during, and after the January 6 Capitol attack is his continued insistence that he is in a position to exert “executive privilege” over the information, given that he is very much no longer the chief executive of the United States, a fact various officials have tried to get through his extremely thick head to no avail. One of the funniest? That he is claiming his fight to prevent the release of the records is entirely altruistic, and that he is waging it not for himself but in order to protect future presidents.

In court on Tuesday, the ex-president’s lawyers argued that allowing the House select committee investigating the insurrection to find out exactly what Trump did and who he spoke to while the Capitol was being sacked will result in Congress going after presidents from here on out. “In these hyperpartisan times, Congress will increasingly and inevitably use this new weapon to perpetually harass its political rival,” Trump attorneys Jesse Binnall and Justin Clark wrote in a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The lawyers went onto claim that henceforth, Congress would find excuses, like the January attack on democracy, to pry into White House documents. “Every Congress will point to some unprecedented thing about ‘this President’ to justify a request for his presidential records,” they wrote.

This, of course, is a hilarious position to take for a few reasons, one of which is that Trump has never not acted entirely out of self-interest in his 75 years on Earth, and probably isn’t going to start now. Another is the notion that Congress is simply acting on partisan motivations here, rather than attempting to investigate one of the worst events in American history. And then there’s the idea that Trump just cares so deeply about the sanctity of the office of the president. Yes, Trump, the man who shat on the presidency on a daily basis from 2017 to 2021—that guy is looking out for future officeholders and desperately wants to ensure no one gets any ideas about abusing their power. It’s a truly believable argument that doesn‘t fly in the face of literally everything we know about him.

Unfortunately for Mother Teresa:

Biden has repeatedly sided with the House [and against Trump] on all but a small number of the requested records, which are being reviewed in batches. Earlier this month, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan turned down Trump’s request for an injunction, saying he was unlikely to prevail in the case. Chutkan said that Biden’s decision not to back Trump’s executive privilege claim seriously undermined it. “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President,” Chutkan wrote in her ruling.

Trump’s attorneys did not address that aspect of Chutkan’s ruling. Trump is instead asking the appeals court to consider the political motivations of lawmakers and the White House—and to presume that rival political parties are likely to seek to punish political opponents above other potential prerogatives.

Chutkan’s ruling “would allow Congress, the most political branch, unfettered access to presidential records whenever the same party is in control of the Executive and Legislative branches,” they attorneys argued. “This would undoubtedly gut the executive privilege.”

“There is virtually, if not literally, nothing under the sun that Congress could not request by the Committee’s and the lower court’s standard,” Binnall and Clark wrote in their filing. Luckily for Trump’s successors, so long as they refrain from inciting an insurrection, they probably have very little to worry about.

Trump lawyer who suggested Hugo Chavez rigged the 2020 election even crazier than previously thought

How crazy? This crazy, according to Betrayal by ABC’s Jonathan Karl:

Betrayal…reports that Sydney Powell…tried to enlist [intelligence official Ezra Cohen’s] help with one the most far-fetched claims about the election, involving then CIA director Gina Haspel. “Gina Haspel has been hurt and taken into custody in Germany,” Powell told Cohen, pushing a false conspiracy theory that had been gaining steam among QAnon followers, according to the book. “You need to launch a special operations mission to get her,” Powell said. Powell, according to the book, was pushing the outlandish claim that Haspel had been injured while on a secret CIA operation to seize an election-related computer server that belonged to a company named Scytl—none of which was true.

“The server, Powell claimed, contained evidence that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of votes had been switched using rigged voting machines. Powell believed Haspel had embarked on this secret mission to get the server and destroy the evidence—in other words, the CIA director was part of the conspiracy,” Karl writes. Powell wanted the Defense Department to send a special operations team over to Germany immediately: “They needed to get the server and force Haspel to confess,” Karl writes. Cohen thought Powell sounded out of her mind, according to the book, and he quickly reported the call to the acting defense secretary.

Powell did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment. A CIA spokesperson told Reuters, “This is the most absurd inquiry I’ve ever addressed, but I’m happy to tell you that Director Haspel is alive and well and at the office.”

Wyoming GOP decides Liz Cheney can’t be a Republican anymore

You can probably guess why:

Cheney has one of the most conservative voting records but has repeatedly taken friendly fire over the past year for criticizing Trump over his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. And so, over the weekend, her fellow Wyoming Republicans offered what not long ago would have been a stunning rebuke of former vice president Richard B. Cheney’s daughter: The state GOP’s central committee voted 31-29 to no longer recognize her as one of their own, the Associated Press reported.

In their resolution, central committee members called on Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to yank her from all committee assignments and excommunicate her from the GOP altogether “to assist and expedite her seamless exodus from the Republican Party,” according to the Casper Star-Tribune. Cheney’s spokesman clapped back, calling it “laughable” to suggest she was “anything but a committed conservative Republican.”

“She is bound by her oath to the Constitution,” Cheney spokesman Jeremy Adler told The Washington Post. “Sadly, a portion of the Wyoming GOP leadership has abandoned that fundamental principle, and instead allowed themselves to be held hostage to the lies of a dangerous and irrational man.”