Heather Cox Richardson

For all that they have tried to argue that the midterm election is a referendum on President Joe Biden’s handling of the nation’s high inflation, House Republicans today released a 1050-page “report” laying out their priorities for what they expect will be their takeover of the House.

The report begins as an attack on the FBI, claiming it has been politicized under the Biden administration and is now “broken.” It goes on to echo years of complaints from former president Trump, from his insistence that the FBI “spied on” his 2016 campaign through his complaints about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents he took with him when he left office.

Only the first 50 pages of the report are new prose. Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo read the rest and noted that about 1000 of the pages simply reprint letters Republican representatives have sent to members of the Biden administration, including 93 copies of a 5-page letter they sent to U.S. attorneys.

The House Republicans’ plan was apparently to grab headlines with an apparently big “report” and make people uneasy about the Biden administration. The document makes it clear that their priorities if they take the House will be to investigate Hunter Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the evacuation of Afghanistan, immigration policies, and, perhaps above all, Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice (DOJ). But the report is a self-own in that it makes clear that the Republicans have no intention of actually trying to deal with inflation and are instead going to push the investigations that keep their grievances before the media and feed their base.

The House Republicans’ decision to double down on Trump just before the election shows exactly how they plan to govern after it. Leaders like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) would like to downplay the role of the former president and keep voters focused instead on the economy, an issue on which they feel they can make headway as the world is still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic. But extremists in the House are signaling that they are all in for Trump.

Indeed, the timing of the House Republicans’ warning that they plan to launch numerous investigations might well be an attempt to protect the former president by taking the spotlight off Trump’s growing legal troubles.

Today, the former president’s allies told media outlets that shortly after the midterm election, Trump expects to announce that he is running for president in 2024. Knowing he is a lightning rod, Republicans have wanted him to stay out of the spotlight before the midterms, but he now has a reason—aside from the fact that he can never seem to abide being in the shadows—to announce his candidacy.

As Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tweeted: “Trump is facing multiple investigations that his advisers anticipate will heat up again after next week’s midterms, particularly into the documents held for no clear explicable reason at Mar-a-Lago. His advisers say he thinks DOJ will move differently if he’s a candidate.” (The Department of Justice has said its procedures will not be affected by any such announcement.)

Trump’s dangling of a presidential bid is almost certainly related to his looming legal troubles. Yesterday, his ally Kash Patel testified with limited immunity before a grand jury investigating the handling of the classified documents Trump took to Mar-a-Lago, meaning he had the option of testifying honestly without penalties or lying and risking perjury charges on this topic. Patel has maintained he is a hostile witness, but there is reason to think he will not shield Trump. Constitutional lawyer and law professor Laurence Tribe commented: “This will break the dam.”

Also, today was the deadline for Trump to produce documents for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the committee this evening announced that it was in conversation with Trump’s lawyers about that production. It continued: “We have informed Trump’s counsel that he must begin producing records no later than next week and he remains under subpoena for testimony starting on November 14th.”

And the January 6th committee has continued its interviews, recently talking to the Secret Service agents who were in the presidential motorcade on January 6, 2021.

Trump has clearly made the calculation that his own interests are best served by teasing the idea of his running for office, despite the fact that many national Republican lawmakers have hoped he would keep his head down.

It is not clear that the idea of a resurgence of Trump will motivate Republican voters. Indeed, so far, election data for next week’s election is not showing the red wave that media has recently tried to argue was in the offing. Pollsters Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier both have focused less on polls and more on the early vote, which so far has shown Democrats overperforming. Races are still very close, but the idea of a red wave appears to be premature. The results of the election will come down to voter turnout.

In the midst of all this drama, the social media site Twitter, which was recently acquired by entrepreneur Elon Musk, appears to be imploding. Advertisers are fleeing, and this morning the company fired a raft of employees, apparently illegally in many jurisdictions because he did not give them the warning that laws require. They are now suing.

This afternoon, Jeff Seldin, the national security correspondent for Voice of America News, tweeted that two organizations representing state election officials who have used Twitter to get out reliable election information, including the National Association of State Election Directors, are watching Twitter’s changes with concern. The mass layoffs cut the teams dedicated to fighting election disinformation and communicating with campaign staff and journalists. Further, it currently appears that account verification, which makes it clear if an account is official or not, will end on Monday, the day before the election.