What’s a little obstruction of justice among friends of ours?
By 
It’s hard for anything to shock any more in this increasingly dysfunctional political system, but the highest ranking Republican elected official in the country is withholding evidence of criminal wrongdoing from the Department of Justice, and openly saying that he’s doing so:
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on Tuesday that House Republicans are taking steps to protect people who illegally broke into the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
When asked a question about releasing more internal batches of internal January 6th security footage, Johnson emphasized that “we’re going through a methodical process of releasing them as quickly as we can.”
He then added a caveat about protecting some of the rioters’ identities.
“As you know, we have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” he said.
“Retaliation” now means “Republicans being prosecuted by the federal government when the president is a Democrat.”
Again, this isn’t some sort of hyperbolic interpretation. It’s a literal description of what the Speaker of the House just said, in public, to journalists.
This is what the Republican party has become, and the idea that everything would be just fine if, say, Nikki Haley were president rather than Donald Trump is flat-out delusional. Of course we’ve got some delusional liberal billionaires out there right now:
When Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, urged Democratic donors last week to rally behind Nikki Haley to provide Republican voters an alternative to former President Donald J. Trump, it seemed a far-fetched plea.
But at least one of the Democratic Party’s biggest financiers has already done exactly that.
Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a major Democratic donor, recently gave $250,000 to a super PAC supporting Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor who has gained momentum in recent weeks in the 2024 Republican primary race. The donation, which has not been previously reported, was confirmed by Dmitri Mehlhorn, a political adviser to Mr. Hoffman.
The pro-Haley super PAC, SFA Fund Inc., was asked specifically by Mr. Hoffman’s political team if it would take money from Mr. Hoffman, given that he is a Democrat who actively supports President Biden, Mr. Mehlhorn said. The super PAC, he added, said yes.
A reminder that Nikki Haley transformed into one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters approximately 3.2 nanoseconds after it became politically convenient to do so, and that even now her only objection to Trump is that she is more electable, given the intense love affair reactionary white voters have always had with women of color who belong to non-monotheistic religions.