Post Politics Now Biden asks companies to help with gas prices; Jan. 6 panel has questions about Capitol tour

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist who is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, corresponded with lawyer John Eastman, who played a key role in efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, according to three people involved in the committee’s investigation.

As our colleagues Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey and Emma Brown report, new emails show that Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known, according to two of the people.

While it had been previously reported that the committee would not spend time during its hearings investigating Ginni Thomas, choosing not to interview her, the panel’s members and staffers are now discussing whether to spend time during their public hearings exploring her role in the attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, the three people told our colleagues.

The emails were among documents obtained by the committee and reviewed recently. Last week, a federal judge ordered Eastman to turn more than 100 documents over to the committee.

Read more on what this means for the investigation here.

New Mexico’s Supreme Court ordered a Republican-led commission in the state’s rural Otero County to certify the results of a primary election, which it has refused to do, citing distrust of the vote-tallying machines used.

The three-member Otero County Commission voted against certifying election results following the June 7 primary because commissioners, according to the Associated Press, said the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in the election could be “manipulated.” Former president Donald Trump has long rallied against Dominion as part of his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The commission’s members include Couy Griffin, who co-founded a group known as Cowboys for Trump, and who has echoed Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Griffin was recently convicted of illegally entering Capitol grounds during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. He wasn’t accused of breaking into the building.

New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, asked the state’s Supreme Court to order the commission to certify the results after it became clear that it would continue to refuse doing so.

Oliver, in her request to the court, noted that other counties in the state could follow the Otero County commissioners’ thinking and fail to certify votes, setting a dangerous precedent for elections in New Mexico.

“We assume other counties will be noncompliant with this provision which jeopardizes the general election ballot for all candidates,” Oliver wrote in her filing.

The Washington Post’s Annie Gowen has more on the story:

A spokesman for Oliver, Alex Curtas, said that office was also pursing a criminal referral with the state’s attorney general, which could result in the commissioners being charged with contempt of court or removed from office if they do not follow the court’s instructions.

Read more about this order here.

The recount of votes cast in the Democratic House primary for Texas’s 28th District starts Thursday, according to sources.

Texas attorney Jessica Cisneros, who challenged Rep. Henry Cuellar (D) for his seat, requested the recount. Cuellar, as of June 6, was leading Cisneros by 187 votes, or 0.4 percentage points, according to the Associated Press. Because the contest was so close, the AP did not project a winner in the race.

Under Texas rules, there are no automatic recounts, but the second-place finisher can request — and pay for — a second tally if the margin of victory is less than 10 percent of the winner’s total.

An electronic recount will start Thursday and is likely to take more than a day to complete, Anna Laura Cavazos Ramirez, who is representing Cuellar at the recount, told The Washington Post’s Arelis R. Hernández.

A spokesperson at the Texas secretary of state’s office deferred comment on the estimated arrival of results to the Texas Democratic Party, which is coordinating the recount since it’s a primary election, but said the office understands that the recount will begin Thursday. A spokeswoman for the party did not respond to a request for comment.

President Biden has announced that Julie Chavez Rodriguez would become a senior adviser and assistant to the president in addition to continuing her role as director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.

This promotion makes Rodriguez one of a handful of Latinas to serve in a senior position in the West Wing. She was previously deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. The announcement was among a number of other positions the president announced Tuesday.

Before joining the Biden administration, Rodriguez was a deputy campaign manager on the presidential campaign. She also served as the national political director and traveling chief of staff for the presidential campaign of then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.).

Rodriguez also served in the Obama administration as special assistant to the president and senior deputy director in the Office of Public Engagement. The California native is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley.

While major broadcast and cable networks are airing the House Jan. 6 hearings live, many PBS stations are holding back, playing the hearings only on secondary digital channels instead of their better-known and more widely accessible flagship channels.

Why? Well, they are reluctant to preempt shows such as “Curious George” and “Sesame Street” for hearings that feature cursing, violence and images of rioters storming the U.S. Capitol, Paul Farhi writes:

Monday’s hearing, for example, took a back seat to children’s programming on WyomingPBS, the statewide public broadcaster. The station aired its usual morning bloc of “Curious George” and “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” on its main high-definition signal. The hearings appeared on a digital subchannel called Create, which typically features cooking and sewing programs and episodes of “This Old House.” …

“We have a commitment to the parents in Wyoming to provide a ‘safe harbor’ on our main channel for their children during the day,” said Terry Dugas, the station’s general manager. As of Tuesday morning, he said, “we’ve received no complaints.”

Public stations in regions that skew blue as well as red made the same kind of decision. PBS stations in South Carolina, New Hampshire, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Iowa, among other states, aired kids’ shows on their main channels, and broadcast the hearings on a digital sub-channel called World, which features news, documentaries and discussion programs.

Still, some viewers are finding it difficult or impossible to locate the secondary channels. And the reluctance to show the hearings on the main channels is ironic, Paul notes, given how public TV stations established themselves as a leading news source in the early 1970s by airing hundreds of hours of another congressional inquiry, the Senate Watergate hearings.

Those hearings, as Paul writes, spawned a nightly recap program hosted by Washington correspondents Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, which became a hit and evolved into PBS’s signature news program — the “PBS NewsHour.”

Read more about these scheduling conflicts here.

The White House continued to tiptoe around the question of whether President Biden will confront Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman about the 2018 murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a regime critic and Washington Post contributing columnist. Biden is expected to travel to Saudi Arabia and meet with the prince next month.

The White House attempted to downplay the news of this meeting, with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre telling reporters Tuesday that “the president is going to see over a dozen leaders on this trip.”

But reporters continued pressing her about this meeting during Wednesday’s news briefing, when one noted that Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, expressed her disappointment over Biden’s plan to meet with the prince.

Hours earlier on Wednesday, D.C. unveiled a street sign designating the stretch of New Hampshire Avenue — where the Saudi Embassy is located — as “Jamal Khashoggi Way.” During the unveiling ceremony, a statement from Cengiz was read, in which she questioned why Biden would be willing to meet with the Saudi leader.

“Mr. President, I beseech you not to lose your moral authority or overlook this heinous crime,” Cengiz wrote. “As disappointing as this is, if you have to put oil over principles and expediency over values, can you at least ask, ‘Where is Jamal’s body? … And what happened to his killers?’ ”

Asked about Cengiz’s remarks, Jean-Pierre said she found her words “devastating.”

“Our hearts go out to her,” she said, before defending Biden’s record on human rights.

“When it comes to human rights … the president is a straight shooter,” Jean-Pierre said. “This is not something that he’s afraid to talk about. He has those conversations leader to leader … on a regular basis.”

Jean-Pierre said she could not, at the moment, “lay out what the agenda is going to be, or what the conversations are going to be. But I can assure you … that when it comes to human rights, this is something that is a priority for this president.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Wednesday that he welcomes support from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who indicated he would vote for him if DeSantis runs for president in 2024. “I welcome support from African Americans, what can I say?” said DeSantis to laughs and applause from the crowd gathered at an American Legion hall in Madeira Beach, Fla.

During a Twitter conversation early Wednesday, Musk — who was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and is now a resident of Texas — said he had voted for a Republican for the first time on Tuesday. He said he voted for Mayra Flores in a special election for a congressional seat in South Texas. Flores won, flipping the seat from blue to red.

Musk predicted “a massive red wave in 2022,” and when asked who he would support for president, he replied “tbd,” but added he was leaning toward DeSantis.

The Republican governor, who hasn’t announced that he is running for president in 2024 but is expected by many to be a front-runner for the GOP nomination if he does, is a fan of the billionaire. DeSantis has praised Musk’s attempts to buy Twitter, saying the world’s richest man would “basically liberate it from being an agent of censorship into making it an actual open platform like it’s advertised.”

“They rejected it because they know they can’t control Elon Musk,” DeSantis said in April. “They know that he will not accept the narrative and that — their little play toy of Twitter — it would not be used to enforce orthodoxy and to basically prop up the regime and these failed legacy media outlets.”

Twitter initially rejected Musk’s buyout offer, but the company’s board later agreed to the deal. However, the transaction has been held up in review and Musk has threatened to pull out, claiming the company has been withholding information, causing Twitter’s stock to sink.

Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tested positive for the coronavirus, the agency said Wednesday.

Fauci, 81, who has long helped lead the U.S. response to the pandemic, tested positive on a rapid antigen test, NIAID said in a statement, which also reports that Fauci has not been in close contact with Biden or other senior government officials.

He’s also fully vaccinated and has been boosted twice.

“He is currently experiencing mild symptoms,” the NIAID statement said. “He will isolate and continue to work from home.”

This is the first time Fauci has tested positive for the virus. He has, at times, opted to avoid large political gatherings because of the virus’s quick spread, including the White House correspondents’ dinner earlier this year that became a superspreader event.

Our colleague Dan Diamond has more here.