| There has been a lot of news recently about the fallout from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. A federal judge said former president Donald Trump probably committed a crime when he encouraged Republicans to stop Congress's certification of Joe Biden's victory. Then we found out that key White House documents about who Trump called during and after the attack that day are missing. And we learned that Ginni Thomas, a powerful conservative activist who is also the wife of a Supreme Court justice, was texting the White House urging it to find a way to keep Trump in power.  Trump speaks on Jan. 6, 2021, just before the attack (Jacquelyn Martin/AP) | Here are two takeaways from this rush of news: - The investigations of Jan. 6 are expanding. The investigation in Congress is targeting Trump's inner circle. This week members interviewed Jared Kushner for hours, and provided "helpful" details, according to a lawmaker. The Justice Department's criminal investigation has been focused on the people who breached the Capitol but is now looking at people who helped organize the attack, The Post reported this week. As those investigations expand, expect more reporting on what they're finding.
- We still don't know what this means for Trump. The Jan. 6 committee will release a report — before the midterm elections this November — on what happened and what it thinks Trump's role was in all this. Politically, that could be damaging for Trump. But there is still no sign the government is investigating Trump for any possible crimes committed.
The Hunter Biden drama, explained  President Biden and Jill Biden hug Hunter Biden on Inauguration Day. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images) | Controversy around President Biden's only living son, Hunter Biden, has resurfaced. A laptop once derided by Democrats as Russian disinformation may actually be Hunter's. In the final weeks before the 2020 election, Twitter banned stories about the laptop and suspended the New York Post's account for reporting on it, prompting conservative claims of left-wing bias. Some quick background: - Hunter Biden, a lawyer, has faced scrutiny over lucrative international business deals in China and Ukraine.
- The FBI is looking into whether he failed to properly report the money he made to avoid taxes.
- There's a raging debate about whether a laptop with details about all this was really Hunter Biden's — or perhaps was hacked by the Russians to make the Bidens look bad. (A laptop purported to be his was left at a Delaware repair shop in 2019, then made its way into Trump allies' hands before the 2020 election.)
This week, The Washington Post released its own investigation of what was in this laptop. Our colleagues used forensic experts to find two things: - A number of the emails related to Hunter Biden's business dealings in China on that laptop match documents about his actual business dealings in China. The report by The Post's Matt Viser, Tom Hamburger and Craig Timburg described how Hunter Biden was going through a divorce and addiction and was broke in 2017 when he signed onto a lucrative offer to represent Chinese energy executives, one of whom was arrested by the FBI. Some of these Chinese transactions with Hunter Biden were flagged by the government as potential criminal activity because they looked suspiciously like money laundering. There is no evidence Joe Biden was involved or that Hunter Biden is under investigation for these Chinese business deals, which all collapsed within a year.
- The Post couldn't say for sure this laptop was Hunter Biden's. Conservatives have accused mainstream journalists of ignoring the laptop, which has become a symbol on the right of the media's supposed bias for Democrats. The reality seems that its owner is much harder to verify after it's been passed around in Trump circles for so long.
The right-wing media has also taken these allegations well beyond the facts. One recently has been particularly egregiously false: That Hunter Biden, who did business in Ukraine, helped fund U.S. military biological warfare labs there. Russia promoted this notion. Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler found there's no ties to Hunter Biden and that the United States does not run those kinds of labs in Ukraine. Biden is the most pro-trans president ever The culture wars over how to parent LGBTQ children is loud, as the number of children identifying as transgender hits record levels. As Republicans roll out legislation around trans issues, Biden has explicitly stated his support for transgender people. He has invited transgender Americans to the White House, said trans people are "made in the image of God" and appointed the nation's highest-ranking openly transgender official, U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine. His administration marked Transgender Visibility Day yesterday by announcing it would allow people to use an "X" on their passports in lieu of a male or female descriptor. Biden's forceful speech on this also allows his Republican critics to cast him as a central villain in their culture war against "woke," liberal changes to society, which is proving to be a potent political organizing force on the right ahead of the midterm elections. |
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