15:07
Joe Biden declared last week that “we have a deal” with the bipartisan $1tn infrastructure package. Then there was a veto threat, and the walking back of the veto threat. Now it’s time to get into the legislative nitty-gritty.
Craig Caplan
(@CraigCaplan)McConnell responds this morning to President Biden’s Saturday infrastructure deal statement: “The President has appropriately delinked a potential bipartisan infrastructure bill from the massive, unrelated tax-and-spend plans that Democrats want to pursue on a partisan basis.”
Craig Caplan
(@CraigCaplan)McConnell: “Now I am calling on President Biden to engage Leader Schumer and Speaker Pelosi and make sure they follow his lead.”
Craig Caplan
(@CraigCaplan)McConnell: “Unless Leader Schumer and Speaker Pelosi walk-back their threats that they will refuse to send the president a bipartisan infrastructure bill unless they also separately pass trillions of dollars for unrelated tax hikes,…”
Craig Caplan
(@CraigCaplan)McConnell: “… wasteful spending, and Green New Deal socialism, then President Biden’s walk-back of his veto threat would be a hollow gesture.”
Read more about what’s to come here:
14:59
In another excerpt, this one previewed in Axios, Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, reportedly “yelled” at Donald Trump, prompting the Trump to yell back: “You can’t fucking talk to me like that!”
Milley had been arguing with Trump that he was not and would not be in charge of the federal response to protests for racial justice.
“I said you’re in fucking charge!” Trump reportedly shouted.
“Well, I’m not in charge!” Milley allegedly yelled back.
This excerpt came from Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael Bender, a Wall Street Journal reporter.
14:45
Barr calls Trump’s election fraud claims ‘bullshit’
Ahoy there, liveblog readers. It appears that the release of multiple books on the Trump administration is imminent, which means we the public are now privy to a wealth of previously unreported details in the form of long-form excerpts.
A particularly explosive one published in the Atlantic had Donald Trump railing against former attorney general William Barr in a three-page statement this weekend. In the excerpt from the upcoming book Betrayal, Barr told journalist and author Jonathan Karl that Trump’s claims of election fraud were “all bullshit”.
“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr said. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”
Barr told Karl that then-senate majority leader Mitch McConnell had urged him to speak out about the fraud claims since mid-November. McConnell had concerns about the GOP’s ability to win the Georgia senate races.
“It’s people in authority like Bill Barr that allow the crazed Radical Left to succeed,” Trump said in a statement, in which he also referred to McConnell as “another beauty”.
Updated
