TGIF! Welcome to Huddle, the play-by-play guide to all things Capitol Hill, on this Friday, February 25. We'll be watching Ukraine all weekend before Congress returns next week. BRIEFINGS ON BRIEFINGS ON BRIEFINGS — Next week there will be in-person classified briefings for lawmakers on the situation in Ukraine. Those follow unclassified phone briefings held last night for the House and Senate. Yesterday Biden also briefed the top four leaders in Congress: Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Anthony has more on Congress Minutes. JOSH AND TED LOOK AHEAD — "In a chamber crowded with ambitious Republicans seeking to command the conservative lane should former President Donald Trump pass on a 2024 run, [Josh] Hawley and [Ted] Cruz stick out. They waged separate challenges to the 2020 election results, announced their support for different candidates in Missouri's hotly contested GOP Senate primary and bottled up separate groups of President Joe Biden's nominees in protest of his foreign policy," writes Burgess. A DIFFERENT KIND OF PROXY — There's a hot GOP primary in Texas that is shaping up to be a proxy war for the battle for the future of the Republican party and McCarthy has weighed in on the side of the establishment. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.): "I'm all about the civil war in the GOP." "This March primary for a deep-red seat pits MAGA forces against the Republican establishment, and the skirmish is part of a larger fight to determine the contours of a possible new GOP majority. McCarthy's involvement suggests that this year, he won't shy away from intervening in deep-red primaries if the outcome could determine whether he leads a majority that is largely aligned with his goals — or one with a significant faction of rabble-rousers willing to publicly stymie his plans," report Ally Mutnick, Olivia Beavers and Elena Schneider. DOCUMENT DUMP?— House Democrats are stepping up their investigation into former President Donald Trump's handling sensitive presidential records, Nicholas and Kyle report. House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y) is asking the National Archives to provide information about top Trump advisers' discussions about preserving and storing White House records — amid growing evidence that they repeatedly ran afoul of record-keeping requirements for documents and social media accounts. "This Committee plans to get to the bottom of what happened and assess whether further action is needed to prevent the destruction of additional presidential records and recover those records that are still missing," Maloney said in a five-page letter to National Archivist David Ferriero. Flushed away? Among the requests is an inquiry related to White House employees or contractors finding paper in a White House toilet, a reference to an anecdote in a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. White House staffers reportedly found pieces of paper flushed down White House toilets, leading them to believe Trump was attempting to destroy documents. Trump has denied the allegation. MORE LIKE OUTHOFE — Sometimes mountains move. Sen. Jim Mountain Inhofe (R-Okla.) is expected to announce that he plans to leave the Senate at the end of the year. The 87-year-old was elected to another six-year term in 2020 and would serve through the end of the year, triggering a competitive GOP primary in deep red Oklahoma. But GOP senators are expected to try and talk Inhofe out of leaving office early, a person familiar with Inhofe's plans told Burgess. (h/t our defense editor Dave Brown for the "Outhofe" pun)
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment