Mitch McConnell Doesn’t Care Too Much if Trump Leads Another January 6

Senator Mitch McConnell still doesn’t have the courage to confront Donald Trump for his actions on January 6, 2021.

In the Capitol Wednesday, CNN’s Manu Raju asked the Senate minority leader if he planned to confront the convicted felon and presumptive Republican presidential nominee regarding issues between the two over the Capitol insurrection, in a planned meeting with congressional Republicans Thursday. McConnell made it clear that he would not.

“I said three years ago, right after the Capitol was attacked, that I would support our nominee, regardless of who it was, including him,” McConnell said. “I said earlier this year I support him. He’s earned the nomination by the voters all across the country. And of course I’ll be at the meeting tomorrow.”

It’s quite telling that McConnell didn’t mention Trump’s name in his answer. In March, McConnell broke his silence and finally endorsed Trump for president—but only after his last opponent, Nikki Haley, dropped out of the race. Less than two weeks after the Capitol insurrection, McConnell criticized Trump on the Senate floor and accused him of instigating the riot.

“The mob was fed lies,” McConnell said. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government, which they did not like.”

But McConnell still didn’t vote to impeach Donald Trump in February 2021, saying that a former president could not face trial in the Senate. In a speech after the vote, he called Trump “morally responsible” for the January 6 riot, called Trump’s actions “a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty,” and noted that Trump was still subject to the country’s laws while out of office.

All of this adds up to a pattern of inaction from McConnell regarding January 6 as well as Trump. McConnell, who plans to step down as minority leader in November, has joined the rest of the GOP in dismissing and ignoring the Capitol riot. McConnell has many personal reasons to turn against Trump, from the former president calling him a “dumb son of a b----” to Trump making racist attacks against his Asian American wife, Elaine Chao, despite Chao serving as Trump’s secretary of transportation. But that would mean McConnell would have to make a moral stand and put politics aside, which is not in his character.

As much as Governor Ron DeSantis would like to be the unquestioned ruler of the Sunshine State, he just doesn’t have that privilege. Executive privilege, that is.

A panel of judges from Florida’s 1st District Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that DeSantis cannot invoke executive privilege to avoid releasing records on his judge selections—not unlike his idol, former President Donald Trump, who has been banking on executive privilege and presidential immunity to shield him from an array of lawsuits. 

DeSantis had mentioned in August 2022 that a group of “six or seven pretty big legal conservative heavyweights” had helped him select state Supreme Court justices. When DeSantis refused to name names, someone filed a records request with his office. His office denied the request, citing executive privilege, so the person anonymously filed a lawsuit to have the records released. 

There is no law establishing executive privilege in Florida, but Leon County Circuit Judge Angela Dempsey still ruled in DeSantis’s favor in February 2023. The plaintiff appealed the court’s decision, and a panel of three appellate judges heard the case last month. Lawyers for the Florida governor again argued that the information was protected under executive privilege, as it related to his constitutional duty to appoint judges, a line of argumentation that could have had major repercussions on the efficacy of public records requests.  

But the panel of judges found that the governor was majorly overplaying his hand. 

“After denying the petition for procedural reasons, the (lower) court unnecessarily considered the merits of the petition and ruled the identities of the legal conservative heavyweights are protected by executive privilege,” wrote Judge Clay Roberts in Wednesday’s ruling. “We expressly decline to rule on the propriety of this ruling as it was irrelevant and unnecessary.” 

Judges Stephanie Ray and Susan Kelsey joined Roberts in his opinion. 

This doesn’t mean, however, that DeSantis will have to comply with the records request. The judges found that the plaintiff’s reason for remaining anonymous was too “vague” and their records request was not specific enough. 

“Appellant broadly requested records between many people during an unspecified period of time. While the records custodian could possibly intuit some contextual parameters, the core information Appellant sought was a list of names Governor DeSantis referenced in a particular interview,” the ruling said. 

The silver lining remains that someone has finally put a check on DeSantis’s power, while he continues to manufacture his voter suppression machine and transform Florida state law into a banner for his culture war. 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene still doesn’t seem to understand how electric vehicles work.

The Georgia Republican introduced a confusing amendment to the 2025 defense budget Wednesday, withholding funding from the electric car industry. But Greene couldn’t seem to specify why that was important.

“My amendment would basically say that no funds should be authorized to or to be appropriated in this act or otherwise made available for the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2025, may be used for electric vehicles or electric vehicle charging infrastructure,” Greene said. “My amendment would ensure that no funds are authorized in this year’s NDAA on electric vehicles or electric vehicle charging infrastructure.”

The word salad follows a similar electric vehicle–related gaffe that Greene made during Donald Trump’s Las Vegas rally on Sunday, when she tried—but failed—to make electric cars sound like a problem that’s hurting people’s wallets.

“If you think gas prices are high now, just wait until you’re forced to drive an electric vehicle,” she shouted.

That quip defied explanation, especially considering that not only are gas prices actually down this month, but by design, electric vehicles don’t actually rely on fossil fuels to run and therefore cost less to juice up.

Donald Trump wants to bring Bitcoin mining back to the U.S.—but it’s not entirely clear that he knows what cryptocurrency even is, or how massively its production strains a country’s infrastructure.

“VOTE FOR TRUMP! Bitcoin mining may be our last line of defense against a CBDC,” the presidential candidate wrote Wednesday on Truth Social, referring to a “central bank digital currency,” or a digital version of the American dollar.

“Biden’s hatred of Bitcoin only helps China, Russia, and the Radical Communist Left,” Trump continued. “We want all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!! It will help us be ENERGY DOMINANT!!!”

But promising to make Bitcoin mining exclusively American wouldn’t exactly be a good thing for the nation, and the very premise of the proposal calls into question whether Trump actually understands what he’s talking about. Mining Bitcoin involves using a decentralized global system of computers to process a blockchain—a long sequence of ones and zeros that effectively translates into a digital public ledger to verify the authenticity of a sale.

Once a Bitcoin is bought and sold, a new line of information is added to the blockchain. Mining Bitcoin requires a computer to solve extremely complex mathematical problems in order to process that chain. In exchange, the miner receives a predetermined amount of the digital currency as payment.

Around the world, Bitcoin miners use approximately 348 terawatt hours of energy (the prefix “tera-” meaning trillions) per year. That means that crypto mining alone consumes more energy annually than most countries in the world use for all residential and commercial activity, including the United Kingdom, Italy, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Australia, according to data aggregated by Visual Capitalist.

As it stands, the majority of Bitcoin mining already takes place in the U.S., accounting for 37.8 percent share of the entire network by hashrate (a computational measure of a cryptocurrency’s blockchain). That’s been the case since the summer of 2021, when China—which previously represented 75 percent of the hashrate—initiated a crackdown on the digital asset, fearing that the highly volatile currency could undermine their nation’s monetary system.

Ultimately, Trump’s promise that more crypto mining would make the country “energy dominant” simply doesn’t make sense. Mining Bitcoin doesn’t produce energy, as Trump’s call for “energy dominance” would imply. Instead, it requires a massive but incredibly unpredictable amount of energy to produce.

It’s unclear just how much energy crypto mining consumes, as the cryptocurrency lobby has actually fought hard to keep the industry’s energy expenditures under wraps. In March, the Department of Energy settled a lawsuit brought by Riot Platforms, halting an “emergency survey” that sought to quantify the amount of energy used by crypto miners while agreeing to erase all energy consumption data that had been collected up until that point.

But the infrastructure strain can be pictured in other ways: In August, taxpayers in Texas paid Riot $31 million not to mine in an effort to stave off rolling blackouts and spare the state’s electric grid.

Trump’s promise may, however, benefit a different sector entirely: the fossil fuel industry, which currently accounts for most of the energy creation in the U.S. and, as a by-product, fuels the majority of mining data centers. Approximately 96 percent of Riot’s energy was supplied by fossil fuels, despite the miner’s claims that it supports the use of renewable energy, according to an analysis by WattTime, a nonprofit tech company.

So his new stance on Bitcoin might make sense after all, given how much of an effort Trump has made recently to cozy up to oil and gas executives.

Jared Kushner’s Saudi Arabia–funded investment firm is finally being seriously examined. Senate Democrats have launched an investigation into Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, seeking information about the company’s investments—after it received $2 billion of its $2.5 billion in investments from Saudi Arabia.

Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden is leading the investigation, noting the peculiarities of nepobaby Kushner’s involvement in business dealings he has next to no experience doing. In a letter Wednesday asking Kushner’s firm to respond to queries about its investors, Wyden wrote:

Mr. Kushner’s limited track record as an investor, including his nonexistent experience in private equity or hedge funds, raise questions regarding the investment strategy behind the seeding investments and lucrative compensation that Affinity received from the Saudi PIF and other sovereign wealth funds.

Virginia Canter, former Treasury Department chief ethics counsel, told Salon that Kushner’s shady business dealings with Saudi Arabia, so soon after he and his father-in-law left the White House, raise serious national security concerns. “It’s one of the most egregious situations I’ve ever seen in decades of working in the federal government as an ethics official,” she said. “It appears to be a payoff as much as a potential investment.”

Kushner’s firm launched in 2021 and immediately received a majority of its funds from Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, with a whopping 99 percent coming from foreign sources. Kushner defended the flood of cash by pointing out that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s fund also invests in Nintendo, Uber, and Microsoft—which is more of an insult to those companies than it is a vouch for Kushner.

“The Saudi PIF’s decision to invest $2 billion in Affinity so soon after Kushner’s departure from the Trump White House raises concerns that the investment was a reward for official actions Kushner took to benefit the Saudi government, including preventing accountability for the Saudi government ordering the brutal murder of journalist and American citizen Jamal Khashoggi,” Wyden wrote.

In 2018, MBS oversaw the brutal assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s White House paid no mind to the murder, instead releasing a shocking statement expressing support for Saudi Arabia and sowing doubt that MBS ordered Khashoggi’s murder, despite a CIA analysis finding that was certainly the case. Trump himself has curious ties to MBS, which during his presidency raised concerns of foreign influence.

This isn’t the first time Congress has sought answers about Kushner’s firm. In 2023, the stench of corruption was so putrid, Congress subpoenaed the company over its ties to Saudi Arabia, with even Republican James Comer saying Kushner’s Saudi blood money “crossed the line of ethics.”