Joe Manchin Announces He Was Totally Kidding About That President Thing

Senator Joe Manchin has officially plucked his tentative cap out of the proverbial ring, announcing that he will not be running for president in an already chaotic election year.

“I will not be seeking a third-party run. I will not be involved in a presidential run,” he finally said Friday, in a speech at West Virginia University. “I am not going to be a deal breaker, if you will, a spoiler.”

That’s exactly what everyone had been warning him about for the last year.

Manchin, a so-called conservative Democrat from West Virginia, had previously announced that he would not be seeking reelection in the Senate, instead spending months traveling across the country to see if he could be the one to “bring Americans together” as a third-party candidate. That is, despite his legacy as a consistently stubborn vote in a narrowly divided Senate.

“Everyone says ‘Joe, are you running?’ The only thing I’m running for is to save this nation, and whatever it takes. There are people out there; there’s a lot of good people. If we can get them energized, there’s a lot of good people that could get in there,” Manchin told reporters in November.

On Thursday, Manchin had not ruled out tapping Senator Mitt Romney or Ohio Senator Rob Portman as a possible running mate, reported local West Virginia publication MetroNews.

Although Manchin’s candidacy was so quiet it practically could have stayed a secret, his push for the White House came after years spent in frustration and tumult over American polarization that increasingly evaded middle ground.

“I know of a lot of my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, who left here early because they couldn’t take it anymore,” Manchin said. “These are good, solid Americans who are very centrist. Some of them were governors before. They couldn’t stand being here because they had to be weaponizing the party system by joining up on the extremes or leave.”

The 76-year-old lawmaker’s unsurprising exit comes at a time when both major candidates, GOP front-runner Donald Trump and incumbent President Joe Biden, are already facing critical heat related to their age. The race breaks a record, set only by each candidate four years earlier, for the most elderly contenders gunning for the most powerful leadership post in the world.

The GOP impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden came to an incredible standstill Thursday night when a grand jury indicted the House Oversight Committee’s star witness in its Biden impeachment crusade.

Special Counsel David Weiss announced the indictment of Alexander Smirnov on one count of making a false statement and one count of creating a false record, related to what he told the FBI in 2020 about alleged corruption by the Biden family and its connection to Ukrainian-owned Burisma Holdings.

In an FBI 1023 report, Smirnov shared “false derogatory information about [President Biden] and [Hunter Biden] ... in 2020, after [Biden] became a presidential candidate,” according to charging documents.

So how did Republicans react to the cataclysmic indictment that tore through the heart of their inquiry by revealing their informant made it all up? By scrambling to refabricate the superficial probe’s shattered remains, of course.

In the wake of the grand jury indictment, Committee Chair James Comer attempted to claim that the “impeachment inquiry is not reliant on the FBI’s FD-1023,” insisting instead that the bureau’s previous credibility endorsement of Smirnov was still relevant.

“To be clear, the impeachment inquiry is not reliant on the FBI’s FD-1023. It is based on a large record of evidence, including bank records and witness testimony, revealing that Joe Biden knew of and participated in his family’s business dealings,” Comer said.

“When asked by the committee about their confidence in the confidential human source, the FBI told the committee the confidential human source was credible and trusted, had worked with the FBI for over a decade, and had been paid six figures,” the Kentucky Republican continued.

Legal representatives for the White House were unsurprised by the development.

“For months we have warned that Republicans have built their conspiracies about Hunter and his family on lies told by people with political agendas, not facts,” Hunter Biden’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement. “We were right and the air is out of their balloon.”

Republicans had spent months building up the hype around Smirnov as a witness, isolating his allegation that Biden had pocketed millions of dollars from the Ukrainian company as the centerpiece of their probe.

“The impeachable offenses, I think the key thing is in Burisma,” House Judiciary Committee Chairmen Jim Jordan told reporters in December.

North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis paid tribute to Alexei Navalny after the Russian dissident died in prison Friday.

“Navalny laid down his life fighting for the freedom of the country he loved,” Tillis wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Putin is a murderous, paranoid dictator. History will not be kind to those in America who make apologies for Putin and praise Russian autocracy.”

In condemning American apologists for Putin, Tillis may have been referencing Tucker Carlson, whose recent interview with the Russian president drew sharp criticism. Tillis himself savaged Carlson’s Moscow grocery store stunt on Thursday, calling Carlson a “useful idiot.”

But he may have also been taking a not-so-veiled shot at other members of his party. Tillis’s position on Russia is evidently not shared by all of his Republican colleagues in the Senate. Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson both expressed reserved praise for Putin’s leadership earlier this week, in comments that look even worse after Navalny’s death.

Tillis, it should be noted, was previously endorsed by Trump and has been careful not to criticize the Republican Party’s front-runner who once called Putin a “genius.”

The North Carolina senator’s comments are hardly a bold geopolitical stance in 2024, but they gesture at a different political reality: There may be a new Cold War brewing in the Republican Party.

It appears Elon Musk has turned against yet another ally in his wayward war against online censorship.

On Thursday, Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone journalist turned blogger, posted screenshots of text messages from Musk allegedly showing that Taibbi had been “shadowbanned” on X, formerly known as Twitter, as revenge for Taibbi’s deal with the publishing platform Substack, which last spring launched Notes, an X competitor.

“Elon, I’ve repeatedly declined to criticize you and have nothing to do with your beef with Substack,” Taibbi’s messages show. “Is there a reason why I’m being put in the middle of things? This seems really crazy.”

“You are dead to me. Please get off Twitter and just stay on Substack,” Musk appears to have replied, all but confirming Taibbi’s suspicion that he was the victim of a “blanket search ban.”

Allegations of censorship would mark an acrimonious, ironic end to Musk and Taibbi’s relationship after Musk trusted Taibbi with publishing the “Twitter Files,” a collection of documents purporting to show X’s (then Twitter’s) coordination with the FBI to suppress mentions of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story and other tweets critical of Democrats. Taibbi, whose exposés of the financial industry in the wake of the 2008 recession garnered the public’s admiration, called the Files, hand-delivered by Musk after he purchased Twitter in 2022, “by far the most serious thing I have looked at, and certainly the most brave story I’ve ever worked on personally.” But Taibbi’s work was called into question by several journalists who reviewed it, and the Twitter Files never had the industry-upending effect Taibbi and Musk promised.

Taibbi retreated to his own Substack to continue to write, and Musk reshaped Twitter in his own Groyper-ish image. Now it appears business has gotten in the way of Taibbi and Musk’s access-based friendship. It’s not immediately clear what this falling out will mean for the future of censorship on X, but it amounts to a burn notice for the source who gave Taibbi the supposed best scoop of his career. At the very least, Taibbi will have plenty of time off X to reflect on his previous work.

A potential witness in the House Ethics Committee investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz claims that she had sex with the Florida Republican at a drug-fueled party in 2021 that she was paid to attend—and she says she has the texts to prove it.

The unidentified victim received payments to attend multiple sex parties with people in Gaetz’s circle and testified under subpoena to U.S. attorneys investigating Gaetz in 2021, handing over texts, photographs, and other evidence, according to the woman’s attorney who spoke with The Daily Beast.

The House Ethics Committee is now weighing that evidence to determine whether or not the MAGA politician paid for sex with women and an underage teenager.

The woman—who was older than 21 at the time she allegedly encountered Gaetz—told prosecutors that the sex was consensual, the outlet reported.

“She told them that she and lots of girls were provided all kinds of controlled substances at these parties,” the lawyer said.

“The availability of vast amounts of alcohol and controlled substances gave rise to the lack of control of the hormonal imperative,” this lawyer continued, “which inspired people to engage in intimate behavior that may or may not have been because they were financially remunerated.”

According to the attorney, the woman’s decision to speak out and come forward was an arduous and taxing one. In the spring of 2021, a Gaetz associate allegedly berated her over whether she had spoken to anyone investigating the Floridian—a tactic that she interpreted as a pressure campaign to keep her quiet.

“This associate was there asking her over and over and over what she had said, demanding she tell them,” the lawyer told the Beast.

The woman’s name appears across several Venmo transactions reported on by the Beast, tallying up nearly $2,500 between March and July 2017 from Gaetz’s former friend Joel Greenberg, who was later convicted of sex trafficking an underage girl.

Gaetz has insisted he has not committed any wrongdoing in relation to the human sex trafficking probe.

The accusations against Gaetz arise from a DOJ investigation into Greenberg, a former tax collector for Seminole County, who was later convicted of sex trafficking. The initial probe also named Gaetz, who Greenberg claimed had paid him via Venmo in order to have sex with an underage girl in 2017.

Eight months after Greenberg warned Gaetz to “steer clear” of the girl, the lawmaker Venmo’d Greenberg $900 in back-to-back payments, per The Daily Beast, telling the taxman to “hit up” the girl on his behalf. At that point, she was five months past her eighteenth birthday, while Gaetz had just turned 36.

Gaetz has repeatedly denied the allegations, though that hasn’t assuaged the nation’s voters, some of whom have shown up to Trump rallies to troll the MAGA Floridian over the accusations.