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Tim ZeeThe worst member of the US House just got endorsed for re-election by Trump.
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Democrats push for commission investigating anti-LGBTQ+ military policies
DrWebTrump’s Investigator Breaks His Silence – The New York Times
Jack Smith, the former special counsel, urged lawmakers on Thursday to stand up for the rule of the law. Credit…Kenny Holston / The New York Timeshttps://open.spotify.com/episode/40B6pujzxOqMK3Ap35pKzc?si=3a645e6425e34190
Jan. 23, 2026, 6:00 a.m. ET
Hosted by Michael Barbaro, Featuring Glenn Thrush, Produced by Alex SternStella TanMary Wilson and Mooj Zadie, Edited by Brendan Klinkenberg and Michael Benoist. Contains music by Rowan NiemistoDan Powell and Pat McCusker. Engineered by Alyssa Moxley.
Three years after his appointment as special counsel, Jack Smith finally delivered the legal argument against President Trump on Thursday that he was never allowed to make in court.
Glenn Thrush, who reports on the Justice Department, explains what Mr. Smith told Congress and why his message is likely to make him Mr. Trump’s next target.
On Today’s Episode
By Glenn Thrush, who reports on the Justice Department for The New York Times.
Background Reading
- In his testimony, Jack Smith defended the decision to prosecute Mr. Trump.
- Here are four takeaways from what he said to a House committee.
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Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s Investigator Breaks His Silence – The New York Times
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Jack Smith testifies in House over Trump investigations – NPR
Former special counsel Jack Smith arrives to testify in a closed-door deposition before the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 17, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Chip Somodevilla / Getty ImagesLaw – Jack Smith defends Trump investigations to House Republicans
Updated January 22, 20263:06 PM ET, Heard on Morning Edition
By Carrie Johnson, 2-Minute Listen, Transcript
Former special counsel Jack Smith on Thursday defended his decision to secure two criminal indictments against President Trump and asserted his team had gathered enough evidence to convict.
Smith gave his first public testimony about his work Thursday, appearing before the House Judiciary Committee. Republican members of the panel attacked Smith’s move to collect phone records of lawmakers who had been in contact with Trump allies around the time of the Capitol riot in 2021. And they cast the historic investigations of Trump as politically motivated.
“It was always about politics and to get President Trump. They were willing to do almost anything,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the panel’s chairman.
“I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties,” Smith responded. “My office didn’t spy on anyone.”
Neither of Smith’s cases reached a jury before Trump won the 2024 election and returned to the White House last year.
Law – Jack Smith defends his prosecutions of Trump in closed-door session in Congress
In a videotaped deposition, Smith said the president had only himself to blame, for charges he tried to overturn the will of voters in 2020.
“The evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy,” Smith said in the deposition, which congressional Republicans released on New Year’s Eve. “These crimes were committed for his benefit.”
Smith said the violent attack at the U.S. Capitol, which injured 140 law enforcement officers, would not have happened, except for Trump. He said he could not understand the president’s mass pardon of members of the Capitol mob on Trump’s first day in office and predicted many of them would commit new crimes in the years ahead.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Jack Smith testifies in House over Trump investigations : NPR
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All anti-transgender provisions stripped from House and Senate funding bills
Censure and How the House of Representatives Polices itself – GovTrack.us
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Analysis and Commentary Jan. 14, 2026: Censure and How the House of Representatives Polices itself »
Censure and How the House of Representatives Polices itself
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Jan. 14, 2026 · by Amy West and Joshua Tauberer
If you’ve watched Law & Order, you know the stories are each divided between the police investigation and the district attorney’s prosecution. Well, for legislators in the House of Representatives, it’s more the police on one hand and the House Committee on Ethics (HCE) on the other. Dun dun.
A bipartisan committee, but politics in practice
Law enforcement, both local and federal, investigate alleged violations of the law. The HCE investigates violations of House Rules. Some things are violations of both laws and House Rules so a representative might get investigated both by law enforcement and HCE. For example, Rep. Cuellar was indicted by federal prosecutors in 2024 for allegedly accepting bribes. The HCE also opened an investigation. Last year he was pardoned by President Trump. So is he free of all concerns now? Probably, but not necessarily. While the legal case is over, the HCE can still investigate the allegations of bribery and censure, and even recommend to expel him, because bribery is also against House Rules.
How did this dual structure come to be?
Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution says
Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.
Only expulsion has any detail to it and that’s that it requires a 2/3rd majority. Otherwise, the House has a range of punishments that have evolved over time to include censure – where not only does a majority vote to agree to a resolution of censure, but the censured member has to come down into the well of the House Floor while the resolution is read – but also reprimand/disapproval in which a majority of the House votes to agree to a resolution of reprimand/disapproval (but the member isn’t called down front to be shamed) and then a range of lesser public indications of “this was bad behavior”.
Until a standing committee to handle ethical or criminal allegations was created in the 1960s, reviews of and votes on censures or reprimands were handled by the whole House. With the establishment of the House Committee on Ethics (HCE), concerns were moved to the small group to investigate and then recommend action to the House as a whole. The HCE has an equal number of members from both the majority and minority parties in the House with the chair coming from the majority party. Most actions require a majority vote, or in other words, require members from both parties to vote in favor of them. In theory, this keeps the HCE from being purely a vehicle for political punishment. Again, in theory.
In 2008, the Office of Congressional Conduct (OCC, originally the Office of Congressional Ethics) was established as an independent and non-partisan office, staffed by career civil servants rather than elected politicians, to handle allegations of misconduct and then make recommendations to the HCE on how or whether to proceed.
Why was the OCC created? Because of the pervasive belief that investigations of legislators were based solely on political goals despite its attempt to avoid this problem in its design. In theory then, an allegation would come to the OCC, they’d investigate to see if there was anything to it and, if so, recommend that HCE use their work to decide how to proceed.
There’s just one problem: all ethics investigations are political because Congress is an inherently political body.
There’s never a case when choosing to investigate a specific legislator’s actions, where the member is in either the majority or minority, won’t have political ramifications. So, when a legislator under investigation complains that they’re being attacked for politics, they’re not wrong, but it’s also not necessarily exculpatory because they may have indeed also broken laws or violated House rules.
Take the recent example of former Rep. George Santos. As soon as he won his election, stories began to appear in the press indicating that he had lied outrageously about a wide range of things in order to get elected. It soon became clear there was evidence that he had also committed a number of criminal campaign finance violations. As a result, there was a lot of pressure within the House to expel him. But, at that time, the Republicans held a very narrow majority in Congress. So as much as he could creditably be said to bring disrepute on the House just by being there and there were vocal objections to his presence from members of his own party, there was a political problem for the Republicans because they needed every vote they could get. Do they let the criminal process play out and keep him as a voting member? Or do they acknowledge his many violations of House rules in addition to criminal codes and take the high road? After nearly a year in Congress, the House chose to expel Santos. He was subsequently tried, convicted, served a few months in prison and then released when President Trump commuted his sentence. This was an unusually obvious case of unethical behavior and even so, political considerations were never not part of the equation.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Censure and How the House of Representatives Polices itself – GovTrack.us
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