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No overarching Jan. 6 news today but a lot of incremental developments over the last 24 hours to catch up on, in no particular order:

I don’t really know what it means to “punt” BBB until next year. I’m serious.

We’re going to hear that phrase a lot, with a certain baked-in assumption that it means something. But it’s not like the assurance that I’m going to finish my homework tomorrow, or complete my term paper this weekend, or turn in this client project by the end of next week. There’s no certainty that this will ever get done.

We keep running into a relatively new and unfamiliar dynamic where the tools of investigative journalism as they are usually deployed wind up obscuring the truth rather than illuminating it.

It’s playing out now in the coverage of the Jan. 6 attack, especially over the last few days. First with the controversial PowerPoint presentation that’s been circulating, and since last night with the Mark Meadows texts.

As the first anniversary of the insurrection approaches, the Jan. 6 committee will probably vote later this evening to refer Mark Meadows for prosecution for contempt of Congress. It’s a proper and necessary step. But it is also singularly unsatisfying and insufficient.

A contempt conviction and a modest jail term for Meadows or Steven Bannon or any other Trumpster determined not to cooperate with Congress doesn’t produce either justice or a warm feeling of schadenfreude. Only a criminal investigation by the Justice Department can bring to bear the resources and stiff punishments that will do justice to the severity of what happened in 2020 and culminated on Jan. 6.

I could read and write all day every day about those days in late September 2020 when Trump became the superspreader-in-chief. It almost feels like an obligation to do so, that we may inoculate ourselves against the potential claims of future historians that we were a blind, gullible, clueless people. Yes, we were, but not nearly as much as this episode suggests. We knew. We got it. The White House COVID outbreak with Trump at its center was very, very bad, and we understood that much in real time, not only in retrospect.

But now we have a new or more precisely an updated account of the shitshow, from someone who was neck deep in the shit at the time. Poor Chris Christie. He was done wrong so many times by Trump. He was the toadiest toady. There was the hostage video. There was this unforgettable headline: “Trump Uses Chris Christie As ‘Manservant’ To Fetch His McDonald’s.” There was Christie being unceremoniously dumped as the head of the transition. But in none of those episodes did Trump try to kill Christie.

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