| The confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson are over. The Senate committee that grilled her and then the entire Senate still need to vote on whether to confirm her. She can get on the court with only Democratic votes, but it could be one of the narrowest confirmations in history — albeit in line with how narrowly Trump nominees got confirmed. Here's what else happened this week in politics. 1. A prosecutor says Trump committed crimes A month ago, two prosecutors resigned from working on the Manhattan district attorney's investigation of former president Donald Trump's finances and business practices. Now we know more about why. One of the prosecutors wrote in his resignation letter that he thought Trump committed multiple felonies and that the outgoing Manhattan district attorney was preparing to indict Trump. These prosecutors resigned because they thought the new district attorney who just got elected, Alvin Bragg (D), wasn't taking this as seriously. "The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did," the prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, wrote in the letter. The New York Times got ahold of this resignation letter this week. Pomerantz said Trump falsified financial statements and lied to banks. The investigation — one of two Trump probes in New York — had already led to one indictment, accusing the Trump Organization and its CFO of doctoring records to avoid paying taxes. Prosecutors were also looking into whether the company inflated its value to get loans. Bragg's office said it is still investigating. We don't know whether Trump will ever get indicted. No American president ever has. 2. Biden says the U.S. will allow in lots of Ukrainian refugees  President Biden with European Council President Charles Michel in Brussels this week. (Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP) | As many as 100,000 Ukrainian refugees will be allowed into the United States, President Biden announced today from Europe. Here are some numbers to put that in context: Ukrainians will make up most of the refugees the United States will take in this year: The Biden administration had already said it would allow 125,000 foreign refugees, total, into the country in the 2022 fiscal year. It's the most refugees the United States has allowed in years: During Biden's first year as president and during the Trump years, the United States capped refugees at 63,500, and at one point in Trump's presidency it was as low as 15,000. It's also the most refugees the United States has allowed in recently from any one country, said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute. It's a tiny fraction of displaced Ukrainians: An estimated 3.6 million have left their homes. Europe is also opening up its doors to take refugees. It's really hard for refugees to gain admittance: Nowrasteh said it's unlikely the United States will actually take in 100,000 Ukrainians. That's because the process to become a refugee takes up to two years — there are 20 steps — and the agency that handles these things is under-resourced and overburdened. 3. There's evidence that Texas's voting law hurt Democrats  (Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle/AP) | Earlier this month, Texas held a primary under a strict new voting law that made it harder to vote by mail. Since Texas limits mail voting to mostly older voters, we surmised that the law could make it harder for Republicans to vote, since they tend to lean older. But data is coming out showing the opposite. This week, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that more than 800 mailed ballots were rejected during the primary in the county that covers the Fort Worth area. Almost all of those rejected were in the Democratic primary; only three were rejected in the Republican one. Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that the mail-ballot rejection rate across the state was higher in counties that lean Democratic (15.1 percent) than Republican (9.1 percent). These are very high rejection rates, and they appear to mostly be affecting Democrats. 4. A Republican just lost his Trump endorsement for not touting election fraud  Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) speaking at the Jan. 6 rally just before the attack on the Capitol. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP) | There are few Republican politicians who championed Trump's false claims that he won the 2020 election as much as Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama. Brooks is now running for Senate, and he had Trump's endorsement — until Trump revoked it this week, complaining that Brooks wanted to focus too much on future elections rather than look back on 2020 (often the code GOP politicians use when they don't agree with Trump's false claims). In response, Brooks alleged this: "President Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency." Brooks was a Republican member of Congress then; he didn't have any power on his own to take away Biden's win. (No one did.) So it's not clear what he meant by saying Trump asked him to rescind the election. This whole thing underscores that Trump will continue to try to bully the Republican Party into denying a legitimate election. | 
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