Congressional Democrats claim top Republicans are trying to rush through the selection process for the next head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) — a watchdog agency housed within the legislative branch — in order to let President Donald Trump place one of his allies into the position before Democrats take back control of Congress in January.

A group of top Democrats who are tasked with recommending candidates to be the next head of GAO — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-MI) and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Robert Garcia (D-CA) — put out a statement Wednesday afternoon, saying Republicans gave them “less than 24 hours” to turn in their submissions of candidates.

This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was adapted from Saira Mohamed’s What a Country Owes Its Soldiers.

Despite Donald Trump’s promises that he would be the peace president, the United States continues to be very much at war, from the forcible abduction of the Venezuelan president to the devastating conflict in Iran. As ever, the country professes its support for the troops, but we hear little about the military personnel in these operations — a day or two of stories on the horrendous conditions on board the USS Lincoln or the losses of American service members in the war in Iran. Typically, the deaths and the injuries are accepted as inevitable, perhaps as tragedies. War is necessarily life-threatening for those who fight it — theirs but to do and die, in Tennyson’s words. Such is the nature of military service, right? And so we thank soldiers for their service and call what they endure a profound sacrifice.

But this is not the only way to think about the military. In some countries, there’s a limit on what military personnel are expected to endure, and governments have a duty to take care of their service members — not just as veterans, but during the course of their service. There’s a basic understanding that even though war is necessarily life-threatening, not all threats to the lives of soldiers are necessary.

Here in the United States, by contrast, there is no such understanding. During these last two decades of war, hundreds of U.S. service members have died in accidents outside of combat, from rollovers of armored vehicles to collisions of ships to crashes of deteriorating aircraft. Untold numbers suffer traumatic brain injuries when they fire their own weapons because commanders won’t implement safety protocols. They develop deadly cancers because of toxic gases their leaders knew were spewing from the burn pits on bases. These are injuries and deaths that even the military admits are preventable. And this is to say nothing of those who have lost their lives in the Iran war (the number of which the Pentagon refuses to disclose), an avoidable conflict for which the administration cannot articulate a coherent rationale). In a country that claims to honor its service members, these kinds of harms should be staggering. But instead, they’re hardly noticed.

Democrats had a big night on Election Day. The bluenami was also filled with tons of nationwide firsts, with many candidates breaking the so-called glass ceiling.

Here are some notable ones:

Two years into President Donald Trump’s unruly presidency plagued by endless lawlessness, corruption, self-dealing, executive branch overreach, a lethal immigration enforcement operation and an unauthorized war that has tanked the economy, House Democrats successfully took back control of the House, and, as a result, Congress.

The Associated Press made the call at 1:25 a.m. EST after Democrats officially secured 218 seats and the majority, hours after Democrats’ flip of the Senate became official. 

Long Night Ahead …

But first, something dumb.

All About the Pretext

A few thoughts on Election Day.

First, we’ll have referenda today on both President Donald Trump and on the polling industry. Going into 2024, there were a few outliers, like Iowa’s Selzer poll, that were giving Democrats false hope. Now, nearly everything that is coming out is showing a good night for Democrats. Scarred by a decade of unpleasant surprises, Democrats don’t want to trust that overall impression. They may be right, but, if they are, it’ll be time for the polling industry to take a hard look at how it’s been doing things in a more online, more atomized, more reactionary and more distrustful time.

Second, as David Kurtz writes this morning, the Trump administration has been facing a cascade of defeats in court. Especially notable to me is the Supreme Court’s rejection yesterday, without comment or any noted dissents, of the administration’s appeals in its effort to mess with California’s election, claiming some 20,000 possible noncitizen voters. Here’s what David had to say about that:

The Supreme Court — in a move for which legal experts could not immediately recall a precedent — unceremoniously smacked down a request from Trump Solicitor General D. John Sauer before it even heard from the opposing side. Sauer was seeking a Supreme Court order for California to sequester and not yet count mail-in ballots from a dubious list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters. The Trump DOJ had already lost in the same case twice at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and once at the district court.

[…]

Justice Kagan referred the solicitor general’s transparently insufficient application for an injunction pending appeal to the full Supreme Court, which didn’t even ask for a response from the other side before rejecting it, with no dissents. The refusal by the six-justice conservative majority to entertain the latest bad-faith nonsense from the Trump DOJ captured the tone of the day.

(The Supreme Court also sent a clear message in September on Trump’s plan to take over mail-in voting via the Postal Service, continuing to show that, while it will imbue Trump with king-like powers, there are some schemes John Roberts’ conservative majority is not ready to rubber stamp.)

As cheering as the Trump administration’s brutal loss record is amid its assault on democracy, it’s worth remembering that during the 2020 election-theft attempt, Trump’s allies filed 60-some lawsuits challenging the results. They won only once, and that win was overturned by a higher court. Still, they built a movement around their claims of mass fraud.

The court filings were key evidence for Trump-aligned conspiracy theorists. The fact that wild claims were touted by lawyers, before a judge, apparently made it all seem official. That judges soon dismissed these lawsuits — for lack of standing, lack of evidence, or other flaws — was little noticed and, when it was, was evidence of the grand conspiracy against Trump. This whole operation to disseminate disinfo via the courts was not accidental; it was an explicit strategy. Emails among Trump’s lawyers reviewed by TPM showed an effort to get as many states contested in court as possible in order to give legislators something to point to on Jan. 6 when they objected to various swing states’ slates of electors.

My message here is not that even when Trump’s opponents win they lose. The media is rife with this kind of doomerism. I’m saying something different: With this administration, we should expect Trump’s fight to continue after Election Day, using lawsuits — even and perhaps especially the ones the administration just lost — as evidence that something has gone awry, something isn’t right. As Mike Rothschild, who writes about conspiracy theories for TPM, recently observed, the Trump fans that still remain in his movement don’t seem very interested these days in boosting his efforts to create new, conspiratorial mythologies. In defeat, that might change. MAGA loves to be the loser and the victim; it has less idea how to use power when it achieves it. So, for better or worse, it’ll be important for us — journalists, and the rest of us too — to remain vigilant in the months ahead, if the polls are right and Democrats bruise the reactionary ego tonight.

As I wrote yesterday, we can already see a kind of Jan. 6 2.0 taking form in an effort not to seat Alaska’s Mary Peltola if she wins. The stakes are lower than 2020’s presidential election, though they’re still quite high. We’ll follow that closely at TPM, and whatever else Trump’s allies manage to cook up.

A Weird Closing Message

• As you no-doubt saw, President Donald Trump delivered his closing message in front of a small audience of what appeared to be government employees at the reflecting pool. He spoke mostly about the mechanics of how the reflecting pool operates, touching on such topics as pipes and algae.
• A representative quote, from Hunter Walker’s write up of the event: “This is a massive piece of — piece of pool. There’s never been anything like — when you look at the side — it’s the biggest anywhere in the world by far and was treated with a lot of love.”
• JD Vance and Don Jr. hit the campaign trail with a series of interesting remarks. In upstate New York, JD Vance called the Democratic candidate, Blake Gendebien, an “asshole” and a “lunatic.” “It is unbecoming for the office, but he can call me whatever he wants to, because I’m focused on what really matters to families in the North Country,” Gendebien told TPM.
• In Ohio, Don Jr. warned, curiously, that Democrats, if they win, will “make Ohio a state.”
• JD Vance offered a too-on-the-nose caricature of the Trump administration’s cynical racism this election cycle, warning Ohio voters that, “there are illegal communities of illegal immigrant Somalis who are coordinating to flood the polls and drown out your vote.” The only way to stop these marauding hordes was for Ohio Republicans to also vote.

The National Pool Guy has spoken. 

President Donald Trump took the stage on Monday afternoon, in the closing moments of the midterm election, to deliver an extremely important message: the reflecting pool on the National Mall has, as he put it, “struggled with leaks, and algae, and very severe problems having to do with weather, and heat, and cold. 

“Believe it or not, it’s never worked,” he said of the famed decorative body of water, which has sat in the nation’s capital for decades. “And it’s never worked because it was always loaded up with leaks and problems.”

Ahead of the speech, it was assumed that the president’s remarks from the National Mall would be a final argument for the campaign, which is widely expected to end in a massive blowout for his Republican Party. However, the majority of Trump’s speech was focused on the pool and his troubled efforts to renovate it. Trump presented himself as an expert tactician and shared details about pool construction and care with the nation. Overall, the president said he was “very proud” of the botched renovation and described the event as “the official opening of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.”

“The pool is now better and more beautiful than it’s ever been before,” Trump declared.

Of course, anyone who’s followed the saga of Trump and his pool over the past several months might recall that it was seemingly fine prior to his attempt to give it a makeover. That effort, which was led by a business owned by a Trump donor, was plagued with issues that saw the pool taken over by bright green algae. 

Trump responded to that mess by making questionable and unproven claims of vandalism. His administration even pursued a criminal case against one alleged culprit that was ultimately dropped by prosecutors. During his remarks on Monday, Trump repeated his assertion that dastardly mischief makers were behind the muck. And, once again he failed to provide any convincing evidence to back up these claims. 

“We went through a lot with vandalism,” Trump said. “The vandalism was unprecedented.”

As he spoke before a small crowd that seemed mostly composed of government workers, Trump also claimed that prior presidents had failed to adequately maintain the reflecting pool. He suggested one of their solutions involved river water. And, while Trump wouldn’t explicitly say why the waterways in the Washington D.C. area were inappropriate water sources for a decorative display, his comments certainly seemed like an oblique reference to the human waste that can be discharged into the Potomac. 

“It became a very dirty, filthy, stagnant mess. It was a real problem,” Trump said of the pool, in the past. “They actually tried using the water from the Potomac — and the water from the Potomac doesn’t work because of certain reasons that I won’t go into.”

Yet the strangest thing about this speech may not have been the improbable mysterious vandals or even the roundabout presidential references to fecal matter. The fact that Trump was focused on touting his renovations and pool maintenance chops on the eve of a consequential election that will decide the balance of Congress was simply extraordinary.

At multiple points during his remarks, Trump did try to bring up his larger efforts to swarm Washington D.C. with federal law enforcement and to beautify the district with monuments that some see as dog whistles for white nationalists. Even when it came to these things, he continued to make bizarre and improbable claims, like suggesting crime had been virtually eliminated in the capital city. His boasts on that front went far beyond the figures touted by his own Justice Department in August when they cheered a 45 percent drop in homicides after federal troops took to the streets. 

“We’ve actually fixed 83 statues and fountains throughout the city,” Trump said. “Maybe the most important thing we fixed is the crime, because the crime is down close to 90%. It’ll be 100%. If there is such a thing.” 

Yet, whenever he briefly referenced issues beyond the reflecting pool, Trump quickly returned to the topic. 

“We fixed the leaks. We resurfaced the bottom in a beautiful dark blue — very dark blue. They call it ‘American Flag Blue,’ but it’s very dark,” explained Trump. “If you had a regular blue — like, I personally love the lighter color blue — but then you wouldn’t have any reflecting. It wouldn’t be a reflecting pool.”

At points, Trump even pulled out visual aids, large before and after photos of the pool prior to his passion project. His background in real estate development and his love of decoration was clear when he showed these off while delivering a long, rambling discourse on “joints,” “pipes,” “rebar,” and the difficulties of color-matching granite. 

“We installed 330,000 square feet of a very strong coating — not strong enough to withstand box knives and knives — but by normal standard pretty, pretty much the strongest coating you can get,” Trump said. 

Even as he circled back to the alleged vandalism, Trump’s various photo displays included no proof of the supposed perpetrators. Along with blaming these unseen villains, Trump suggested the two Democrats who have preceded him in office were at fault for many of the pool’s woes. 

“The joints that were here that we took out, they were put in there a long time ago and we took it out,” recounted Trump. “Obama and Biden put in much of it, but it was all very defective material. And that’s one of the reasons it leaked so badly.” 

Trump then turned to the grass around D.C.’s national monuments. He showed pictures indicating how this had indeed been vandalized with “86 47,” a slogan that Trump argued was inspired by one of his greatest rivals: former FBI Director James Comey. The Trump administration has been engaged in an effort to criminally prosecute Comey, who previously investigated the president, for making a social media post with the phrase, which is rooted in restaurant industry parlance for removing a troubled customer. But for Trump, it’s so much darker than that. 

“This was sad because this was the grass and it was totally vandalized up here,” Trump said as he held up photos of the scorched earth. “And this was put out on the surface ‘8647.’ You know what that means? That was a Comey phrase. 8647, that means ‘kill 47.’ That’s a mob expression that Comey, I guess, was the first one that I heard put it out. So, not nice.”

That incident was evidently particularly painful for Trump since he truly appreciates vibrant foliage. 

“Like the human being, grass has a life also,” the president said. 

In general, Trump framed the alleged attacks on the reflecting pool in highly emotional terms. 

“This is a massive piece of — piece of pool. There’s never been anything like — when you look at the side — it’s the biggest anywhere in the world by far and was treated with a lot of love. Then, it was treated with a lot of hate,” Trump said, adding, “We’ve got to stop the hate.”

After over 20 minutes that were largely pure pool, Trump did indeed address tomorrow’s midterm elections. The president, who is facing historically low approval ratings amid spiking prices and an unpopular war he launched with Iran, touted his own record on foreign policy and the economy. He also trashed the Democratic Party candidates running against his allies using highly exaggerated and questionable accusations.

“These are the most dangerous candidates ever put up. There’s never been anything like what we’re seeing jihadists and Muslim Brotherhood members and people that nobody can even believe what we’re looking at,” Trump said. 

Trump suggested voting for his fellow Republicans was a vote for the American way of life. 

“We have to keep our Congress strong, free — a little bit of apple pie, there’s something very nice about that,” said Trump. 

Yet, time and again, he returned to the theme of the pool and his various beautification projects in the nation’s capital. He claimed the makeover had stopped a wave of deadly attacks surrounding the city’s famed tourist attractions. While he didn’t share any real world examples, Trump spun a graphic vision of these horrific incidents from his mind. 

“We’re not calling people now from Iowa to tell them that their son has been killed, he’ll be coming home in a casket. Somebody from Indiana — family from Indiana — ‘I’m sorry to inform you, but your son was standing at the base of a very beautiful monument and he was killed instantly and he’ll be coming home to you in a coffin.’ We don’t do that anymore,” said Trump. 

Overall, the president made it painstakingly clear that he believes there are very violent forces swirling around D.C. — especially in the pool.

“Look, it’s not an easy thing,” Trump said as he recounted the renovations. “The algae is brutal. It forms easily.”

‘I Give It Better Than a 50% Chance Of Passing’

President Trump is warning House Democrats of supposed consequences to come if they vote on articles of impeachment against the bombastic and shameless Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the new Congress, should they win control of the House in a few short days.

“I think it’s terrible,” Trump told the Washington Examiner on Thursday morning before heading out to another rally for Republican candidates in South Carolina who probably do not want him there. “All they do is they talk about impeaching everybody.”

“I mean, honestly, if we wanted to play that game, we could play it just as well,” Trump said. “But they’re talking about Pete Hegseth. He’s doing a great job. He’s a great warrior. I think he’s the best at his job in many, many years, and a lot of people agree with him.”

It’s not clear what Trump means by “we could play it just as well,” but he is likely referring to his intention to veto anything that comes his way should Democrats pull off an upper and lower chamber sweep. No one would expect any different.

The fault in Trump’s logic is intertwined with a problem that has plagued House Republican leadership throughout the entire 119th Congress — a problem of their own making, too: Thomas Massie.

This is a free edition of Where Things Stand.

Take My Bribe, Poors

As frequent readers of Where Things Stand and therefore TPM you don’t really need another rundown from me on just how out of touch President Trump is when it comes to the everyday needs of Americans. We’ve known it for decades.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) — who has repeatedly questioned the polls showing Democrats flipping the House of Representatives — insisted Tuesday there will be a “peaceful transfer of power” following the midterm elections.

Johnson called the question asking him to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in January regardless of what the results are “silly,” saying the Constitution will be followed.

Murkowski Endorses a Dem, Denounces Trump’s Attack on Alaska’s Election

Like Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the pattern with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), a relatively moderate voice in today’s extreme GOP, is that while she may critique Trump publicly, she often votes to support his policies when it matters.

But in recent days, Murkowski has been offering some substantial, pre-election pushback to the president.

On Tuesday, she endorsed a Democrat for governor over Trump’s chosen candidate.

“I have found fault with the Dunleavy administration,” she told Alaska News Source of the current governor, Republican Mike Dunleavy, who is term-limited. “I think that they have left federal money on the table. I think in certain areas, where we have worked hard to put opportunities from the federal side, here, into the state, the state has failed with it.”

“I think it’s been a hard eight years in many different areas, and Alaskans are looking for something different,” she added, describing Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, the Democrat, as a “young Alaskan with a view and a perspective that I think Alaska needs right now.”

JKT, as he’s often called, is up against three Republicans, one of whom, Bernadette Wilson, was endorsed by Trump. He was already favored to win, in part because of the split Republican field.

Murkowski has supported Democrats before — she endorsed Mary Peltola’s campaigns for House in 2022 and 2024. Her more significant move, I’d argue, was on Friday denouncing the DOJ’s pre-emptive lawsuit seeking to block Alaska from certifying its election if a Democrat wins, a lawsuit Trump said he ordered.

“The State of Alaska has already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year’s ballot,” she said, pushing back on the DOJ’s premise that two Dan Sullivans on the ballot had hopelessly tainted the election.

“The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit,” she said.

That clear-eyed assessment from the most prominent Republican voice in the state predictably triggered Trump to lose it. Over multiple Truth Social posts, he called Murkowski “Republicans’ Worst Senator, by far,” “a DISGRACE to Alaska and our Country,” and falsely suggested she fraudulently won a previous race.

“They’ve been trying to get rid of Lisa Murkowski forever in Alaska,” he claimed.

Flávio Bolsonaro’s Big Escape

• When Brazilian authorities ordered Flávio Bolsonaro — the recently defeated, Trump-aligned candidate for president — to turn over his passport this week amid a money laundering investigation, he scoffed that he would never think of fleeing the country.
• But yesterday morning, news began to emerge in various South American outlets that that may, in fact, have happened.
• Its unclear how Bolsonaro ultimately made his escape, with some reports suggesting it was via Argentina, to the south, where President Javier Milei is an ally of the Bolsonaro family and Trump, and others suggesting he left via Venezuela, to the north.
• Regardless, it was the Trump administration that offered his family refuge, and by Tuesday evening he was in Florida.
• The journey inspired a bit of déjà vu, as his father took a similar trip after a 2022 auto-coup attempt he led, reminiscent of January 6, failed.
• Flávio Bolsonaro promised to keep rallying his allies from the U.S.

Republican Party Adds New Plank to Its Platform: Ramaswamy’s Ad Was ‘So Good’

For a day or so, Republicans expressed discomfort with Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s new ad, in which Democrat Amy Acton’s mother denounces her as a longtime liar. Left out of the ad: that Acton and her brother have not seen their mother since the 1970s, when her mother’s husband — Acton’s stepfather — was indicted for allegedly raping Acton, then fled to avoid trial. His wife, featuring in the video, stood by him then and still does.

Don’s ‘Dividends’

Republican incumbents and candidates facing data center outrage back home have been trying to get President Trump to land where he just landed on data centers for months, as the party works to develop some sort of concrete campaign position for candidates on an issue that has sparked ubiquitous backlash across the nation.

Republican leadership and Trump’s allies, for their part, attempted to carve out a compromise lane for candidates to operate within on the campaign trail, as Trump made his position on the matter clear: he’s in bed with Big Tech and, thus, entertaining no nuance. Both Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Vice President JD Vance tried to obscure Trump’s obstinance on data centers by suggesting in August and September that the tech companies expanding and building them need to cover their electric costs, either by “putting power back into the grid,” as Vance suggested, or by finding ways to make the data centers “self-sufficient.”

“They ought to be able to take care of their own utilities, their own power, and that ought to be a given any place they go in the country. But they shouldn’t be going places where there isn’t support for them at the local level,” Thune told a local South Dakota TV station in September.

Another Senate Republican, Jon Husted, is locked in a heated campaign in Ohio that is also foundering under the weight of the data-center backlash. I’ve written before about the data center skeletons in Sen. Jon Husted’s (R-OH) closet, left over from his time as lieutenant governor. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has skillfully spun this baggage into a pretty compelling attack operation. Husted then mounted an ultimately unsuccessful gambit to try to get Senate Dems to help him pass legislation that would help him on the campaign trail, which I wrote about here.

But the crux of the matter is this: Husted was pushing to pass a bill, the Ratepayer Protection Act, that would direct state utility regulators to consider implementing new standards that ask Big Tech companies to cover the cost of electric bills and the grid updates needed to run their data centers.

Officials in the Trump administration in August were even working to convince tech and utility companies to sign a pledge to prevent AI model-driven electricity cost hikes.

This is all to say, Republicans have been trying to stand in this lame space between support for Big Tech and its wild enthusiasm for data centers and AI, and Americans’ bipartisan outrage about the risks to their communities and their finances that come along with the facilities. And Trump has not let them, determining a few months back that anyone who is against data centers — and the strain they place on local resources — is “backwards and poor.”

Now, just shy of two weeks from Election Day, he’s come around to other Republicans’ position. In a Truth Social post this morning, Trump “mandated” (whatever that means) that tech companies “make their own electricity” and pay communities that host the facilities “dividends” (he also put this term in quotes, so unclear if he or anyone knows what that means):

As the President of the United States, I have been watching Data Centers very closely, and have come to a very strong conclusion. New and large, in some cases gigantic, Data Centers are mandated by me to make their own electricity, and give or sell any excess back to the local community, or grid, and therefore there is electric price increase. In fact, there could be a substantial decrease. Other elements likewise! If companies want to make their Data Centers popular, pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a “dividend.” I have watched the process closely, and Data Centers that were highly unpopular in a certain area, have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck. MAKE DEALS, and get them built!!! GREAT FOR THE U.S.A. President DJT

Republicans have done this to themselves by advocating against AI regulation (state level anti-regulation measures were ultimately stripped from the Big Beautiful Bill before passage, however) and getting in bed with the tech oligarchs gunning to buy off politicians for years. And Democrats struggled with how to message on the matter until the American public invited them to seize on their indignation.

There are a few key races that will reveal whether Trump’s last ditch data center pivot was effective this cycle.

Speaking Of Big Tech Backlash

In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

People love a grand conspiracy. The bigger the scheme is, the more people get drawn into it. And the more details and players that are involved, the more believable it seemingly becomes. After all, who would go to the trouble of making up something so complicated? It must be true.

And nobody loves a conspiracy more than President Trump. He and his inner circle especially seem to have fallen in love with what has literally been dubbed “The Grand Conspiracy.” It’s a hopelessly complex, entirely unevidenced theory claiming that a high-ranking group of political figures have been plotting in the shadows for years to stop Donald Trump from making America great again through investigations, indictments and impeachments. It has all the hallmarks of the type of grandiose schemes that Trump supporters especially fall for: countless players, sprawling plots, intricate secrets, and a total lack of evidence that it actually took place.

Despite lacking cogent answers to foundational questions such as “what it is” and “who is doing it,” revenge for the Grand Conspiracy has been a driving force in the administration, prompting an investigation that has trundled along over the last year and a half, involving dozens of officials looking for some reason to indict the president’s enemies.

And there are many, many enemies. They include a greatest hits of Trump’s obsessions and grievances, from former special counsel Jack Smith to minor players like former FBI agent Peter Strzok, and even former President Barack Obama himself. According to Grand Conspiracy believers, they are all powerful Deep State figures who supposedly worked together in a single, years-long scheme to destroy Trump and undo the will of the people. 

Precisely what these conspirators have actually done remains unclear — even, seemingly, to the prosecutors themselves, who, per the Wall Street Journal, complained to the Justice Department that they weren’t getting much guidance from the local U.S. attorney. The probe is now being run out of Washington, where it continues to baffle those assigned to move it forward. 

In the last few weeks, there have been a host of indications that DOJ efforts to prosecute these figures — and tie them all together into one grand scheme — are falling apart. And, as the Grand Conspiracy prosecution flails at DOJ, the claims also aren’t doing much in the court of public opinion, where Republicans are looking for anything they can find to shore up their crumbling midterm prospects.