| | | | |  | | By POLITICO MAGAZINE | | 
| |  Illustration by Klawe Rzeczy / Getty Images / iStock | It was February 12, 2021, the day before the second impeachment of Donald Trump would come to an end, and impeachment manager Jamie Raskin was stunned. Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington had told CNN she had proof that Trump had been no silent observer on January 6, 2021: He had sided with the mob that stormed the Capitol, flatly refusing House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's plea to intervene. It was a bombshell — but thanks to both Republicans and Democrats, it would not go off. In this excerpt adapted from their book, Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, Rachael Bade of POLITICO and Karoun Demirjian of the Washington Post reveal the forces (on both sides of the aisle) that unraveled the second impeachment — in particular how Democrats hobbled their own case to convict Trump by shooting down a last-minute bid for witnesses. "Even some Republicans who had stuck their necks out to impeach Trump after Jan. 6 would hide in fear of political retaliation rather than help the [impeachment] managers," they write. "And Raskin and his team would learn to their dismay that their own party could prove equally obstructionist when it suited their political purposes." Bade and Demirjian take us behind the scenes for the frantic final hours of Donald Trump's second impeachment, a moment that exemplifies "the susceptibility of impeachment to the political whims of Congress." Read the story. | | | | 
| "Bill Clinton's foreign policy experience is pretty much confined to having had breakfast once at the International House of Pancakes." Can you guess who said this about then-President Bill Clinton in 1992? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**
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POLITICO illustration / Getty Images / iStock | Fanone's Fight Continues … Michael Fanone, the tatted, expletive-prone ex-cop who nearly died defending the Capitol on Jan. 6, is used to the snarling randos who accost him on the street. But in his new memoir, he directs most of his scorn at the bigwigs who he says have sought to sweep the riot under the rug, including Kevin McCarthy, national Fraternal Order of Police President Patrick Yoes and Lindsey Graham — who, Fanone writes, threatened to walk out of a meeting with the mother of officer Brian Sicknick, who died after confronting pro-Trump rioters. "I just want people to fucking recognize what happened on January 6," he tells Michael Schaffer in this week's Capital City column.
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| 62 percent … of Republican women say they've heard "nothing at all" about Lizzo playing James Madison's crystal flute, compared to 38 percent of Democratic women.
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Jim Vondruska for POLITICO | Eye On the Sky … Air Force veteran Jennifer Ruth-Green faces tough odds in her Indiana District 1 race against Democratic incumbent Rep. Frank Mrvan, but her record fundraising numbers and unique story have made it a real contest. She took Adam Wren up in a 1979 Piper Warrior to talk about running against "woke madness" as a Black, Asian, Republican woman.
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| The heat was just turned up in one of the most hotly contested Senate races in the country this week after the Daily Beast reported that staunchly pro-life Republican nominee and former NFL star Herschel Walker allegedly paid for a woman he got pregnant to have an abortion. Here's what you need to know from POLITICO's Meridith McGraw and Natalie Allison, who is reporting from Georgia. - Surprised? You must not be a Republican operative in Georgia. The allegations were well known in the state before the news broke, and some in the GOP even tried to warn the Walker campaign this could be bad for his candidacy. Walker's team downplayed the risk. - Walker's son, Christian, a popular conservative influencer with over half a million Instagram followers, called his own dad a liar and hypocrite on social media: "Family values, people? He has four kids, four different women, wasn't in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women." - So far, Republican leaders are standing by Walker. Ex-NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch said, "I don't care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate." - Walker's campaign says they've been able to turn lemons into over $500,000 in fundraising. - On the ground in Georgia, people weren't spending much time pondering Walker's ex-girlfriend's 2009 abortion, if they had heard about it at all. But that, of course, may change, and we can expect to see Democrats beginning to put money behind ads hitting Walker on this.
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Elon Musk | Pool photo by Patrick Pleul | Why Twitter Will Tame Musk … When Elon Musk takes over Twitter, will he wreck it into a Trumpy pit of disinformation, or take it to the stratospheric heights of SpaceX? "Knowing Musk, he could possibly do both," writes Jack Shafer . "But you've really got to doubt that." It will be in his financial interest to make Twitter as wholesome as Starbucks — even if he changes the way the site works.
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This rare original Pablo Picasso poster was created for the World Congress held in Moscow three months before the Cuban Missile Crisis. | via eBay | Memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis have returned, both because we are approaching the 60th anniversary of the famous "Thirteen Days" in October 1962, and because Vladimir Putin has been casually hinting that he might use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. In July 1962, a congress convened in Moscow to call for world peace and nuclear disarmament. It was a beautiful cause, and Pablo Picasso created a beautiful poster — an original is available on eBay for $1500. But as events would prove, the whole thing was a sham. As the delegates expressed their pacifistic hopes, Nikita Khrushchev was already sending nuclear weapons to Cuba, laying the foundation for the gravest crisis in the history of Russian-American relations. (From historian Ted Widmer.)
| | | **Who Dissed answer: It was Pat Buchanan, who'd lost the Republican primary to George H.W. Bush that same year, addressing the Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas. politicoweekend@email.politico.com | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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