Washington dc

The calm tones and bipartisan agreement at Wednesday's congressional hearing didn’t match the zany issue on the table — UFOs. During the two-hour hearing, every congressman accepted the premise that UFOs exist. It seems the one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on is that the truth is out there.   Three former military and intelligence officials testified before the House Oversight subcommittee that America is being kept in the dark about unidentified anomalous phenomena, known as UAPs — and no one in Congress questioned it.   Representative Tim Burchett, who has been calling for a congressional hearing for months, set the tone during his opening statement. “This is an issue of government transparency. We cannot trust a government that does not trust its people.

The Department of Justice denied agents investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes and foreign business deals access to evidence and witnesses, according to two IRS whistleblowers.   The House Oversight Committee heard testimony from Special Agent Joseph Ziegler and his supervisor Gary Shapley of the IRS during a six-hour hearing Wednesday. The two agents involved in Biden’s criminal probe expressed frustration at how US attorney for Delaware David Weiss and prosecutors within the DoJ handled the investigation.

“Because that’s where the money is.” That was the answer that Willie Sutton, an expert in his chosen field, gave when asked why he robbed banks. Maybe the Bidens, Joe and Hunter, should consider employing a kindred candor about their business activities in Romania, Ukraine and elsewhere back when Joe was Obama’s VP.   So far, they have been disappointing on that score. Here’s the state of play: an FBI whistleblower revealed the existence of a complicated bribery scheme that allegedly funneled millions of dollars into the Bidens’ coffers via a network of at least twenty shell companies set up to launder the dough.

Welcome to a later-than-usual debt-ceiling brinkmanship special edition of the DC Diary. The mood music was encouraging as Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden sat down for talks in the Oval Office this evening. “We still have some disagreements, but I think we may be able to get where we have to go,” said Biden to pool reporters. “We both know we have a significant responsibility.” McCarthy was similarly positive. Hours earlier, treasury secretary Janet Yellen wrote to lawmakers telling everyone what they already knew: that the US is “highly likely” to run out of money to pay all its bills if “Congress has not acted to raise or suspend the debt” as early as June 1. Not news, exactly, but an effort to focus minds.

Kevin McCarthy rose to the speakership despite being loathed by a lot of very online conservatives and a rump portion of his own party in the House. He had to win that role across multiple votes, which the media pronounced as humiliating, indicative of a GOP incapable of governing and all the normal tropes that partisans such as Jake Tapper deploy in place of real informed analysis of the situation. This is why they’ve proven to be so utterly wrong about McCarthy’s strength as a leader since taking the gavel.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has been out of the public eye for weeks, following a serious fall that hospitalized him. Now multiple sources confirm that Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming, John Cornyn of Texas and John Thune of South Dakota are actively reaching out to fellow Republican senators in efforts to prepare for an anticipated leadership vote — a vote that would occur upon announcement that McConnell would be retiring from his duties as leader, and presumably the Senate itself. One source says that Cornyn has been particularly active in his preparations, taking fellow senators with whom he has little in common to lunch in attempts to court them.

A few weeks before Easter, a staffer for Republican senator Rand Paul was randomly and brutally attacked in downtown Washington, DC. The staffer, Phillip Todd, was leaving dinner with his friend when an assailant stabbed him four times in the abdomen, skull, brain and lungs. He suffered a punctured lung and potential brain bleeding. Todd was rushed to hospital, where he was operated on and ultimately survived the attack.   The man who stabbed Todd is a forty-two-year-old named Glynn Neal. Like many of DC’s violent criminals, Neal has a lengthy rap sheet. Virginians for Safe Communities, a nonprofit organization, detailed the man’s long history of criminal behavior.

Is this news? Mike Pence “seized the spotlight” in DC this weekend when he “slammed former president Donald Trump in what amounts to his strongest criticism to date of his former running mate.”  Of course Pence did. He is, for the time being, running for president. Naturally he is going to set his sights on the the biggest beast in the room. And that beast, in case you haven’t noticed, is Donald Trump. (And, really, can’t Politico do better than “former running mate”?) Pence, having himself been subpoenaed by the January 6 Entertainment Committee (he doesn’t plan to testify) is nervous about his role in that jamboree.

The National Park Service cleared a major homeless encampment in downtown Washington, DC on Wednesday, a move that eased local residents and infuriated activists. McPherson Square, located just blocks from the White House, has been effectively cordoned off from the rest of the public since the proliferation of the tent city during the pandemic. The Spectator was the first to report in December that the NPS would start enforcing its no camping policy on park land in the nation’s capital. Signs went up around McPherson Square last month warning the inhabitants of the tent city that they would be removed on February 15.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, or what’s left of it, is in shambles. The Democratic group’s staff has dwindled down to nothing, following months of turmoil under its newly elected chair, Representative Nanette Barragán, who took over in December. In the weeks since, the group’s staff have all either left voluntarily or been fired. Most recently, Barragán fired the group’s lone survivor, executive director Jacky Usyk — news that was first publicized by the anonymous Instagram account, Dear White Staffers, which has been prolifically documenting the CHC turmoil. While Barragán has only been in Congress for six years, Legistorm data show that she has the third highest turnover rate of congressional staff in the past twenty years.

Anna Paulina Luna is a bad girl. Why else would the Washington Post be so eager to discipline her? Reporters Jacqueline Alemany and Alice Crites, truly a modern-day Woodward and Bernstein, appear convinced that the freshman congresswoman representing Florida’s 13th congressional district is a George Santos retread. The pair of bullies went rummaging through Luna’s panty drawer in search of skeletons. The result? A lengthy article intended to punish her — to which several corrections and clarifications have been added in the days since its publication.

A high-ranking Biden administration official has left the Department of Energy following months of lawsuits and inquiries from Congress about her conflicts of interest. In December, Kelly Speakes-Backman quit her job as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, or EERE, to become a vice president of public affairs at Invenergy, a green energy company. One of Invenergy’s focus areas is energy storage and batteries. Electric batteries are a top priority of the Biden administration, specifically the Department of Energy. Intriguingly that was exactly what Speakes-Backman was working on both during and before she joined the administration, where she led the agency's office on energy efficiency and renewable energy.