Weekly Recap: Feb 17th - 23rd
A recap of the big political stories affecting the United States this past week.
The main informant used as the core of the Republican impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden was arrested for lying to the FBI. Alexander Smirnov had been working with Russian agents to create the lies that were used to elevate the conspiracy that House Republicans have touted for years. This is the same informant who gave the information on the FD-1023 that the House Oversight Committee made a big fuss about despite FD-1023 being for unconfirmed reports.
This follows on the heels of Republicans failing to produce any evidence against Joe Biden. Every witness brought in to testify by the Oversight Committee stated that there was no wrongdoing by Joe Biden and that he was never involved in any of the businesses in question. Republicans also failed to find any wrongdoing when reviewing President Biden’s bank account records.
This was always a manufactured conspiracy created by Giuliani and Russian agents working within Ukraine, but Republicans seem poised to continue the impeachment inquiry despite this latest major blow to their case.
In other Russian news, President Biden met with the loved ones of Alexi Navalny after his suspicious death in a Russian arctic torture prison. Navalny was a long time opponent of Putin and had previously been poisoned but still returned back to Russia knowing his eventual fate. President Biden declared new sanctions on Russia and Russian individuals in response to Navalny’s death. These are in addition to the numerous sanctions over Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Donald Trump took a different approach of only mentioning Navalny’s name in comparison to himself. Trump attempted to compare his fraud trial penalties to the persecution that Navalny faced. There is no comparison between a criminal who is receiving due process, who is allowed freedom of speech, and who is allowed to travel the country campaigning for President while facing serious criminal trials, and an honorable man who stood defiant against a tyrant and who died attempting to end Russian oppression.
Alabama in vitro fertilization clinics are pausing procedures as they attempt to navigate the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that sided with three couples who had embryos destroyed after an issue at a storage facility. The Supreme Court ruled that the couples could sue for the wrongful death of their “extrauterine children”, declaring that embryos are children under the 2018 Alabama law that declared unborn fetuses as children and gave unborn children specific rights.
This ruling casts doubts on what IVF clinics can and can’t do in the state and what types of legal issues those clinics face with procedures and storage of embryos.
This is the latest complication surrounding extreme abortion laws that have been passed in red states. These issues have also cast a spotlight on candidates in the 2024 election and where their position lies with national abortion bans or codifying abortion rights. Abortion issues have been at the heart of numerous Republican defeats in elections across the country and will play a large role in the 2024 elections.
The South Carolina Republican primary happens tomorrow, February 24th. Despite Nikki Haley being the former governor of South Carolina, she is expected to lose by a significant margin to Donald Trump. Haley recently stated that she plans to stay in the race through Super Tuesday and will only drop out if she reaches the point of being mathematically unable to win the nomination.
Trump meanwhile has been angry that Haley has stayed in the race as it means more of his resources are going towards winning Republican primaries instead of campaigning directly against President Biden.
However, the bigger challenge for Trump is his legal battles. Trump’s campaign and PACs have seen themselves spending more than they are bringing in both in the second half of last year and in January of this year. The largest expenses are his legal fees. The RNC is also low in funds compared to other years and some of their expenses have been Trump’s legal fees as well.
In contrast, both President Biden and the DNC have been seeing large amounts of fundraising and have, so far, had much lower expenses than the Trump campaign. Biden’s campaign, the DNC, and PACs supporting Biden all have large amounts of campaign cash on hand.
Finally, this week saw a private American company land a robotic lunar lander on the moon’s surface. This was America’s first return to the moon in over 50 years and the first commercial spacecraft to land on the moon. Getting the Odysseus lander to the moon’s surface was a combined effort between NASA, SpaceX, and Intuitive Machines who built the lander.
