As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
In a bit of a dog-bites-man revelation, the January 6 committee, in the form of Rep. Liz Cheney, has enough goods on the Malignant Loser to make a criminal referral to the DOJ:
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol has enough evidence to refer former President Donald Trump for criminal charges, the vice chair of the panel, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), said Sunday.
“It’s absolutely clear that what President Trump was doing, what a number of people around him were doing, that they knew it was unlawful. They did it anyway,” Cheney told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
She was responding to a New York Times report that the committee leaders were divided over whether to criminally refer Trump to the Justice Department, despite concluding they had enough evidence to do so on charges of obstructing a congressional proceeding and conspiring to defraud the American people. The report cited people involved in the discussions.
According to Cheney, the committee has not yet decided whether to make a referral.
“I think what we have seen is a massive and well organized and well-planned effort that used multiple tools to try to overturn an election,” Cheney said.
The division over referral seems to center around whether it would complicate any ongoing investigation that DOJ was already conducting-- an investigation, we might add, that is very slow in developing and whose targets remain largely unknown.
Putin's kleptocracy is on the verge of defaulting on its bond payments:
Ratings agencies say Russia is on the verge of defaulting on government bonds following its invasion of Ukraine, with billions of dollars owed to foreigners. That prospect recalls memories of a 1998 default by Moscow that helped fuel financial disruption worldwide.
Ratings agency Fitch said Wednesday that “a default or a default-like process has begun” because Russia missed a March 2 payment to foreign investors, such as funds that invest in emerging market bonds. That set off a 30-day grace period before the country would officially default. [snip]
Once a country defaults, it can be cut off from bond-market borrowing until the default is sorted out and investors regain confidence in the government’s ability and willingness to pay. Russia’s government can still borrow rubles at home, where it mostly relies on Russian banks to buy its bonds.
Russia is already suffering severe economic impact from the sanctions, which have sent the ruble plunging and disrupted trade and financial ties with the rest of the world.
So the default would be one more symptom of Moscow’s wider political and financial isolation as a result of its invasion of Ukraine.
Sad!
They're going to a runoff in France's elections, as expected. And the stakes are high, as E.J. Dionne, Jr., lays out:
