Classified Documents Found at Mike Pence’s Home in Indiana

Classified government documents were found at the home of former Vice President Mike Pence, CNN reported Tuesday.

Pence’s lawyers found about a dozen classified documents in his Indiana residence last week and immediately alerted the FBI. The discovery is a direct contradiction of Pence’s insistence that he had never taken government records.

When asked in a CNN interview last November if he took classified documents from the White House, Pence responded, “I did not,” while conflictingly nodding his head.

The discovery also comes after multiple batches of classified documents were found in President Joe Biden’s Delaware home and former private office. It is actually oddly easy to take such documents by mistake at higher levels of government, where officials are allowed to keep copies of records, according to Larry Pfeiffer, a former CIA officer who ran the White House situation room under President Barack Obama.

“There’s this level of human frailty here that just plays into this situation,” Pfeiffer told NPR on January 19, after the second batch of Biden documents was found. “I’ve known several people who have retired, and after they retire, they’re going through their box, and it’s like, whoa, how did that get in here?”

Pfeiffer noted that those discoveries are not treated as very big deals. Biden, former President Donald Trump, and now Pence are all under such intense scrutiny because they are either sitting or recent leaders, which is a situation we have not seen before.

Pence also criticized Biden for keeping classified documents, calling out what he considered a “double standard” between the way Biden and Trump have been treated. “It’s just incredibly frustrating to me,” Pence said on the conservative Hugh Hewitt Show, slamming the FBI for “massive overreach.”

In the same CNN interview where he denied taking classified documents, Pence said he saw “no reason to have” such records.

There are huge differences between Biden and Trump, though. Biden, and even Pence, found relatively few documents, immediately alerted the proper authorities, and appear to be cooperating with the investigations into how the classified information ended up there.

Trump, on the other hand, hoarded hundreds of documents and refused to cooperate, resulting in the FBI raiding his Mar-a-Lago estate.

After Arizona Representative Ruben Gallego announced his candidacy for Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate seat on Monday, most congressional Democrats remained noncommittal about who they will back (if not, perhaps, hinting support for Gallego).

There were two notable exceptions, however: West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper, per Punchbowl News. “I think having a voice like that—she says what she thinks. And I think she adds value to the caucus,” Hickenlooper said. “The problem is she’s too moderate as a Democrat—well, that’s half the time what they say about me!”

Hickenlooper also nodded toward Senators Angus King and Bernie Sanders as two independents who caucus with the Democrats, citing them as examples for why Sinema should apparently be seen no differently. “I can’t imagine not supporting her,” he said.

Manchin, meanwhile, said he’s “totally supportive” of Sinema and said leadership “should support someone who brings basically some peace, if you will, or some rational thinking on some of this stuff without being pushed far left and far right.”

It’s understandable why most Democrats aren’t expressing their preferences one way or another. It’s still very early, and Sinema is still a voting and committee-sitting senator in a narrowly Democratic-led Senate. What’s more fascinating is why senators would so publicly express their support for Sinema given how early it is, how Sinema has not even expressed her 2024 intentions, and how Kari Lake or some other far-right Republican may soon announce their candidacy, raising the stakes of the race all the more.

Manchin’s early support for Sinema is unsurprising in a “Manchinema” universe that has plagued politics over recent years, obstructing a voter-won Democratic agenda and watering down legislation in favor of corporations at the expense of everyone else.

Hickenlooper’s support, on the other hand, seems less immediately intuitive. A look at his record at least presents an ideological affinity between him and Sinema. A longtime fossil fuel–favoring politician, Hickenlooper has been a linchpin for corporate influence in government. Hickenlooper famously shilled for fracking at a 2013 hearing, as he described drinking a glass of Haliburton-produced fracking fluid alongside Haliburton executives.

He was one of seven Democrats that joined Republicans to block a fracking ban in 2021.

Hickenlooper has shifted somewhat left on climate, perhaps propelled by the moment or by the 2020 primary challenge against him by Andrew Romanoff, endorsed by the likes of Bill McKibben and the Sunrise Movement. Still, Hickenlooper seems to find some kinship with his fellow “too moderate” Sinema.

The entrance of a Republican like Lake into the race, as well as Sinema’s moves from here on out, will indicate how eager Democrats actually are to rid themselves of her antics and how far they’re willing to go (and risk) to make it happen.

Nazi, white nationalist, and Taliban fan Nick Fuentes is back on Twitter.

Fuentes was originally banned from Twitter in July 2021 for his dangerous and violent rhetoric about people of color, women, Jewish people, immigrants, LGBTQ people, Covid-19, and much more.

Even after being banned from Twitter (and several other social media platforms), Fuentes continued his venomous tirade against everyone and everything in the world that is not him. He has proudly said he’s “just like Hitler,” has called for the right to embrace becoming a “truly reactionary party,” and has said that “Catholic monarchy, and just war, and crusades, and inquisitions” are much better than democracy.

Just last week, Fuentes called Hitler “a pedophile … also really fucking cool.”

And now Elon Musk’s Twitter has brought him back.

Fuentes proudly announced his return Tuesday morning:

Musk’s reinstatement of Fuentes legitimizes all the vicious garbage the Nazi has spewed, and essentially returns to him a massive avenue to spread it further:

And in an era of Twitter where the “For you” tab seems to operate more like a TikTok-ified right-wing funnel, amplifying accounts that many users would have no business seeing, the danger of Fuentes’s return cannot be overstated.

The reinstatement comes after Musk’s repeated failed attempts to bring Kanye West, known now as Ye, back to Twitter. In December, West appeared alongside Fuentes on Alex Jones’s InfoWars, where he peddled Nazi propaganda, Holocaust denialism, and support for Hitler. Later that night, he posted a swastika. Musk reneged and finally resuspended West. This episode was shortly after West and Fuentes shared a dinner with former President Donald Trump—one that relatively few Republicans denounced, by the way.

Fuentes’s return follows the reinstatement of other Nazis such as Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi publication The Daily Stormer. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jordan Peterson, vicious transphobe Megan Murphy, and Trump himself round up other prominent individuals who have had their accounts reinstated after committing various and numerous Twitter policy violations.

California Governor Gavin Newsom slammed the Second Amendment as his state reels from its third mass shooting in as many days.

Newsom was visiting Monday evening with victims of the tragic Monterey Park shooting when he received reports that there had been another shooting in Half Moon Bay, which killed seven people and injured one more.

Just a few hours earlier, he told CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell that the Second Amendment, which many Americans believe guarantees them unfettered access to guns, is “becoming a suicide pact.”

“Nothing about this is surprising. Everything about this is infuriating,” he said of the Monterey Park attack.

The Half Moon Bay attack is California’s third mass shooting in just three days. A 67-year-old gunman opened fire on a mushroom farm and a nearby trucking facility. The victims were primarily Chinese laborers. It came just hours after a shooter attacked a gas station in Oakland, killing one person and wounding seven others. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as one where four or more people are shot.

The Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay attacks are the deadliest in their respective counties’ recent history. The Half Moon Bay massacre was the thirty-seventh mass shooting in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive. There has already been another mass shooting since Half Moon Bay, meaning there have been more mass shootings than there have been days this year.

California has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, but they’re not foolproof when regulations at the national level have so many loopholes. As The Washington Post noted, “The state’s strict gun laws are incapable of fully preventing gun violence in a country where gun ownership is widely considered a constitutionally protected right, firearms move freely between states with vastly different regulations and gun-control measures are dotted with exceptions.”

It’s been a day since President Joe Biden picked Jeff Zients, his former Covid-19 response adviser, to replace Ron Klain as his chief of staff, and the reaction has not been pretty.

Zients comes from the private equity world and is estimated to have a net worth of between $89 and $442 million, according to MarketWatch. He made a lot of this money investing in health care corporations. Zients’s investment fund, Portfolio Logic, featured multiple firms that paid millions of dollars in settlements for alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud. He was also one of the original investors in the popular Washington, D.C., bagel chain Call Your Mother (one of the few local restaurants the Bidens have frequented).

Zients served under President Barack Obama as director of the National Economic Council and acting director of the Office of Management and Budget. He won praise under Obama for helping to repair the Healthcare.gov website after a bungled rollout, and again under Biden for his handling of the massive Covid-19 vaccine rollout.

But he only served as Biden’s Covid czar for a year, stepping away after the administration was accused of failing to prepare for the delta and omicron waves, sharing confusing messaging about testing and booster shots, and allowing Covid prevention funding to dry up. Both Public Citizen and the Center for Economic Policy and Research criticized Zients’s tenure, particularly his refusal to allocate resources for vaccination efforts abroad.

Jeff Hauser, founder of the nonprofit Revolving Door Project accused Zients of “profiteering in healthcare” and said Biden risks his legacy with the nomination. Progressive groups are worried that Zients will be less amenable to the causes that they and even the Biden administration have championed. Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, expressed hope that Zients will prove them wrong.

“Ron Klain has been an open ear and even-handed engager of actors across the Democratic Party,” Green said in a statement. “Whomever the next chief of staff is, that will be the continued hope and expectation.”