Post Politics Now Biden in the West with eye on boosting fellow Democrats

Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s campaign for Senate said it has raised over $1 million since he appeared in an interview with NBC News that aired Tuesday evening.

The interview is the first one Fetterman has given in person since he suffered a stroke in May. In it, the Democrat assured voters that he is fit to serve as a senator.

The fundraising total also comes a day after the White House announced that Biden will go to Pennsylvania to support Fetterman, who is running against Republican Mehmet Oz in a closely watched race.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol will present its closing argument on Thursday in what’s likely to be its final hearing about past and ongoing threats to democracy as voters prepare to cast ballots in next month’s midterm elections.

During a background briefing with reporters, committee aides teased new video footage from when the violence was unfolding, along with evidence that will illuminate President Donald Trump’s state of mind before, during and after the attack.

A debate over debates flared again in Arizona on Wednesday as the state’s election information agency scrapped an event with GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake that Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs had already refused to join.

Hobbs has declined to debate Lake, citing a GOP primary debate that drew ridicule online and arguing the event would be unproductive given Lake’s repeated false claims the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. “How do you debate someone who refuses to accept the truth, who doesn’t live in facts?” she said recently on MSNBC.

Family members of former Nevada attorney general Adam Laxalt don’t want him to become the state’s new senator.

In a letter obtained by the Nevada Independent, 14 of Laxalt’s relatives endorsed his opponent, incumbent Senate Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. While Laxalt’s relatives don’t mention him by name in the endorsement, they praise Cortez Masto’s record in the Senate and say they believe she “possesses a set of qualities that clearly speak of what we like to call ‘Nevada grit.’ ”

This isn’t the first time members of Laxalt’s family have turned out against him. Laxalt, the grandson of former Nevada governor and U.S. senator Paul Laxalt, drew rebukes from his family when he ran for governor in 2018 and claimed that he had been raised in the state. In an op-ed at the time, Laxalt’s family pointed out that, while he was born in Reno, he left Nevada as an infant, was raised on the East Coast and moved back to Nevada only in 2013 — a year before launching his political career. They also questioned his qualifications to lead the state.

The founder of the Oath Keepers and other leaders of the self-styled militia movement were in contact with Secret Service officials multiple times in late 2020 and leading up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to an agency official and court testimony in Stewart Rhodes’s ongoing seditious conspiracy trial.

As Rachel Weiner and Carol D. Leonnig report:

A former member of the Oath Keepers testified last week that the group’s founder Stewart Rhodes claimed to be in touch with someone in the Secret Service in the months before the riot. A Secret Service official confirmed that members of the agency’s protective intelligence division reached out to the Oath Keepers in advance of protests in D.C. in November and December as well as the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally.

Agents regularly engage in such advance contact with protest groups expected to attend public presidential events, the official said. The goal is to explain what items are prohibited and learn more about the protesters’ numbers and plans to assess the risk to protected officials.

Rhodes and four associates are now in the midst of a trial expected to last at least a month, in which they face the most serious charges of the criminal investigation into the Capitol riot. Jurors have heard evidence that prosecutors say shows the Oath Keepers wanted to keep former president Donald Trump in power by force, trial testimony that comes just as the House committee investigating Jan. 6 prepared for what is expected to be its final public hearing Thursday.

Los Angeles City Council member Nury Martinez, a Democrat, resigned from her position Wednesday after being heard making racist remarks in a recording of a phone call with two other council members.

In a statement, Martinez, who had been facing calls to resign from leaders in her party — including President Biden — said she’s leaving the council “with a broken heart.” While highlighting the work she did over the past nine years as a Los Angeles lawmaker, Martinez in her statement failed to acknowledge the controversy that led to her resignation.

Blake Masters, a Republican Senate nominee in Arizona, appeared on Fox News on Wednesday afternoon, where host Harris Faulkner pressed him on his views about the 2020 election. Not that Masters has repeatedly stated that Donald Trump should still be in the White House, mind you — a claim that demands explication — but that Masters had seemingly backed off the position, removing a statement to that effect from his campaign website.

“I think if everyone followed the law, President Trump would be in the Oval Office,” he said. “Look at how the FBI pressured Facebook and other Big Tech companies to censor true information about Hunter Biden’s very serious crimes in the weeks before the election. … I think that one act of corporate censorship, of Big Tech censorship? That sent Biden into the White House.”

A Trump employee has told federal agents about moving boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago at the specific direction of the former president, according to people familiar with the investigation, who say the witness account — combined with security-camera footage — offers key evidence of Donald Trump’s behavior as investigators sought the return of classified material.

As Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey report, the witness description and footage described to The Washington Post offer the most direct account to date of Trump’s actions and instructions leading up to the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of the Florida residence and private club, in which agents were looking for evidence of potential crimes including obstruction, destruction of government records or mishandling classified information.