Principals

☞ White House: Well, this is a first: the Biden campaign turned video of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. talking about the president’s domestic agenda at a Turning Point Action conference into a campaign pitch. The Biden reelection effort also announced it would be headquartered in Wilmington, Del. — Biden’s hometown — after the 2020 campaign was based in Philadelphia.

☞ Senate: Bills to target financial assets of organizations involved in fentanyl trafficking, establish a “bug bounty” program for AI used by the Pentagon, and make records available about “unidentified aerial phenomena” have been added to the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act, according to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

☞ House: Israeli President Isaac Herzog will address a joint session of Congress today at 11 a.m. Ahead of the speech, the House overwhelmingly voted to pass a Republican-authored resolution declaring that Israel “is not a racist or apartheid state.” Only nine Democrats voted against the resolution. Later today, the House will also begin consideration of the FAA bill.

☞ Outside the Beltway: Illegal border crossings dropped to their lowest level in more than two years: Border officials intercepted 99,545 people along the U.S.-Mexico border in June, a 42% decline from May and the first time monthly crossings have dropped below 100,000 since February 2021. The decline is also notable because it comes in the wake of the Biden administration’s new immigration policies to counteract the expiration of Title 42, the pandemic-related measure that had tightened border regulations.

Judge Aileen Cannon hinted on Tuesday that the December start date prosecutors proposed for Donald Trump’s classified documents trial was too soon, but also appeared skeptical of the former president’s request that it be delayed until after the 2024 election. Cannon did not make a decision on the timing of the trial one way or another during her first conference with attorneys from both sides yesterday afternoon, but said she would do so “promptly.”

A U.S. soldier is being detained in North Korea after crossing over the border from South Korea. Private Travis King mixed in with a tour group and bolted across the demarcation line “willfully and without authorization,” according to the Pentagon. The Associated Press reports that he was being held on assault charges in South Korea and was supposed to be transferred home to Fort Bliss, Texas, to face disciplinary action.

Ron DeSantis made his return to mainstream media Tuesday in a 15-minute sit-down interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. During it, he refused to answer yes or no about whether he’d sign a national 6-week abortion ban, like his administration enacted in Florida; declined to say if he’d stop arming Ukraine or push it to cede land to Russia in a peace deal; and said he hoped Donald Trump would not be criminally charged for his role in Jan. 6. The candidate, currently in a distant second place, also dismissed questions about his struggling poll numbers.

Meanwhile, a new potential headache for DeSantis: A super PAC supporting Sen. Tim Scott’s White House run said it would plunk down $40 million on ads in early primary states between now and January, the largest ad buy for any candidate so far. Some major political donors have begun eying Scott as a potential anti-Trump in light of DeSantis’ rocky start.

Michigan’s Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel charged 16 fake electors who signed certificates falsely claiming Trump won the state in the 2020 election. The group faces charges of conspiracy, forgery, election law forgery, and publishing a counterfeit record. The defendants include current and former state Republican officials, including a Republican National Committee member, a mayor, and Trump supporters who were the plaintiffs in a separate lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 results.

— Morgan Chalfant and Jordan Weissmann

Punchbowl News: The White House has its eye on two potential candidates as it hunts for a new legislative affairs director: Jamie Fleet, a longtime adviser to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and current aide to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries; and Shuwanza Goff, Biden’s top House legislative affairs staffer for the first two years of his term.

Playbook: Politico leads with the fallout from Trump’s looming indictment, but also notes that an influential trade union, the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters, is endorsing Biden’s reelection campaign today and putting $1 million behind a member-to-member TV ad campaign backing the sitting president.

The Early 202: As Republicans’ House campaign arm gears up for the fierce 2024 battle to defend its slim majority, NRCC Chairman Richard Hudson has a plan to help vulnerable GOP members hold their seats — one that centers around “turbocharging” fundraising efforts for battleground races in part by encouraging members to give directly to candidates rather than to the committees.

Axios: Trump is fuming because his former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who’s now the governor of Arkansas, hasn’t endorsed his 2024 campaign, Axios reports.

The political world reacts as another Trump indictment looms

THE NEWS

Washington geared up for yet another Donald Trump indictment on Tuesday morning, when the former president announced that he was a target of special counsel Jack Smith’s probe into the January 6th riot and efforts to overturn the election.

THE VIEW FROM LEGAL EXPERTS

The investigations into January 6th and Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results have touched on so many different angles that experts cautioned against making assumptions about what the charges might entail.

Rolling Stone reported on Tuesday evening, and other outlets confirmed, that the target letter indicated the investigation related to “conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States; deprivation of rights under color of law; and tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant.”

The timing of the letter suggests Trump will likely face charges in a matter of weeks. While there aren’t any other known targets of the special counsel’s investigation, Randall Eliason, a George Washington University law professor and former assistant U.S. attorney in D.C., said that was likely to change given the assumed conspiracy charge.

“I think people would be surprised if it was a standalone indictment of just him,” he said. “Other target letters could still be coming, they just haven’t got them yet.”

THE VIEW FROM JACK SMITH

Smith did not comment on the news himself, but was spotted by CNN visiting a Subway in Washington. (No word on his sandwich order.)

There was, however, a flurry of news about who has or has not received a grim letter of their own from the special counsel. Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, both at the center of various investigations, indicated they had not received notice that they were in Smith’s crosshairs (at least not yet).

As for potential witnesses: Former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who pushed back against efforts to reverse Biden’s victory in 2020, told CNN through a spokesman that he had been contacted by the special counsel and would “do the right thing.” Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, whose state is also the focus of Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ investigation, told NBC News he had not spoken with Smith’s team.

THE VIEW FROM DONALD TRUMP

The Trump campaign has plenty of practice at this point dealing with indictment news. After Trump announced the target letter from “Deranged Jack Smith” on Truth Social, the Washington Examiner reported that he checked in with House Republican leaders to discuss a response while his campaign pressured Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to defend him without reservation.

Trump later appeared at a town hall in Iowa with Fox’s Sean Hanity, who said that the former president didn’t seem to be bothered by his legal woes. “No, it bothers me,” Trump responded. “It bothers me for everybody in this incredible sold-out audience.”

THE VIEW FROM 2024 REPUBLICANS

DeSantis once again struggled to strike a balance between defending Trump from legal charges, criticizing some of his underlying behavior, and not letting the whole episode overshadow his own campaign.

The news stepped on his big mainstream media debut, breaking just minutes before he sat down with CNN host Jake Tapper. “I hope he doesn’t get charged,” DeSantis told Tapper, saying he was worried about a trend toward “criminalizing political differences.” However, he added that “I don’t think it serves us good to have a presidential election focused on what happened four years ago in January.”

But the newsiest comments came at a separate event in South Carolina, in which DeSantis delivered his toughest criticism yet of Trump’s actual role in January 6 — even as he raised similar concerns about prosecution.

“I think it was shown how he was in the White House and didn’t do anything while things were going on,” DeSantis said. “He should have come out more forcefully…but to try and criminalize that, that’s a different issue entirely.”

Others reacted similarly. Mike Pence criticized Trump’s actions during the riot during an interview on NewsNation, but said he hoped the former president wouldn’t be indicted and that he is “not convinced” Trump committed a crime.

Vivek Ramaswamy called the expected charges “the ultimate threat” to democracy, but stood by his past criticism of Trump’s “abhorrent” behavior on January 6 in interviews with ABC News and Fox’s Neil Cavuto and said voters should judge the former president.

Nikki Haley told Fox News that “we can’t keep dealing with this drama,” and said Trump’s many ongoing legal problems would be a “further and further distraction” if the party nominated him.

THE VIEW FROM CAPITOL HILL

Trump’s Republican allies eagerly lined up behind him to argue the letter was evidence of political targeting by the Justice Department. Speaker Kevin McCarthy went so far as to suggest that Trump’s recent polling gains caused Smith to jump into action.

The comments were more muted from Republican lawmakers who have broken with the former president in the past. “It’s part of the distractions that are always going to be surrounding the former president. And people have to make their own judgments about whether or not they want to have that going forward,” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D. told CNN.

Perhaps the most grim — if somewhat inscrutable — take came from Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., who said voters had become used to the Trump indictment cycle by now. “I think it shows that politicians lie and they know they’re lying,” Lummis told HuffPost’s Igor Bobic. “The liar knows that people know he’s lying, and the people that are being lied to know they’re being lied to. That is political reality in 2023.”

‘Bigotry on display’: Markup turns ugly as Republicans strip LGBTQ funding

An ordinarily uneventful budget markup turned explosive Tuesday when Republicans on the House Appropriations committee unexpectedly stripped money for three projects benefiting the LGBTQ community from the Transportation Department and HUD funding bill.

The highly unusual GOP maneuver triggered a ferocious dispute with Democrats.

Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis. assailed the Republican move as “insane” and accused GOP members of fostering the types of hate crimes against LGBTQ people that he faced earlier in his own life, “when I first ran for office, where they wrote dead f—t over your face and sent [the newspaper article] to you in the mail. Or the time that when I wasn’t out yet, left the gay bars, and people followed me and beat me with a baseball bat until I was bloodied and unconscious and called me a f—t.”

The committee’s top Democrat, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, compared it to “negotiating with terrorists” and attacked the influence of the Freedom Caucus. DeLauro later withdrew her comments from the record, though the panel recessed three times over eight hours due to the intense split. One observer called it “the ugliest committee markup I remember in ages.”

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., said his amendment was intended to remove “problematic funding” from the bill. Other Republicans like Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont. argued federal dollars should be barred from paying for gender-affirming medical care.

The nixed earmarks include a project in Massachusetts that would have channeled $850,000 to an LGBTQ group providing housing services. Another would have set aside $1.8 million for a community center in Pennsylvania providing social services to the LGBTQ community.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., had requested $970,000 for the LGBT Center of Greater Reading. She said the GOP move was “bigotry on display” and swiped at Zinke for mispronouncing the city’s name.

“My community says they want this. The people who are standing up there can’t even pronounce the city of Reading,” Houlahan told Semafor. “They don’t live there.”

The final vote was 33-26 along party lines.

—Joseph Zeballos-Roig

The former acting Acting Director of Central Intelligence, John McLaughlin, mesmerized the moderators and speakers and big donors and special guests of the Aspen Security Forum with a disturbingly excellent magic show Tuesday. “Merlin” McLaughlin’s sleight of hand with ball, rope, and cards humbled the jaded, hyper-rational national security audience at former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman’s magnificent Aspen mountainside home. They included British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, French National Security Advisor Emmanuel Bonne, US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, billionaire businesswoman and former Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, Kenyan National Security Advisor Monica Juma, and many others VIPs.

I start with this vignette of the evening because McLaughlin’s performance was the only time today when China wasn’t mentioned. I think it’s important for know-it-alls to be reminded that they don’t actually know it all, and in a backhanded way, McLaughlin’s lesson was apt tonight and reminded generals and admirals, diplomats, foreign policy wonks and journalists to beware of bias and their own certainty about things.

—Steve Clemons

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Hillary Schieve has served as the independent mayor of Reno, Nev. since 2014 and is the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. She is visiting Washington this week with a delegation of fellow mayors to draw attention to mental health needs in cities.

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, according to data from our partners at Ground News.

WHAT THE LEFT ISN’T READING: Biden’s new income-driven repayment plan for student loan borrowers could cost $475 billion over a decade, according to an estimate from the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: Texas troopers were told to push migrants back into the Rio Grande and deny them water, according to an email reported on by the Houston Chronicle. The revelations have triggered new scrutiny of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose office released a joint statement from state border and public safety officials denying that any orders had been given “that would compromise the lives of those attempting to cross the border illegally.”

• The investment firm founded by anti-woke crusader Vivek Ramaswamy is dialing down the very anti-woke rhetoric that made it prominent.
• NATO must invite Ukraine in next year, three former NATO leaders argued in a guest column for Semafor Security.
• The group CEO of Africa’s largest bank by assets explained why it’s time to bet on South Africa and Nigeria.