Page A236From§Each · the News book12 November to 13 November 2026
News
By MitchInvestigations · the morning edition, 12 November 2026
Before a single subpoena existed, the fight over oversight had already picked its vocabulary. That was last week's column: White House counsel told the incoming Oversight chair that the investigations he had not yet opened were already "blatant criminality." On Nov. 8, Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters that Democrats "are not allowed to just go around threatening existing members of the administration, to go around threatening companies" — and that this was what the president was "extremely worried about." The same week, the Justice Department answered a separate probe, into the donors financing the White House ballroom, by calling the probe itself a threat against Trump supporters.
On Wednesday, the threat got a letterhead. Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, sent Sen. Richard Blumenthal a letter dated Nov. 11 warning him to preserve records tied to his ballroom-donor inquiry. The Hill's account of the letter describes Reitz accusing the senator of using congressional oversight to harass private citizens — the senator who opened the inquiry is now the one told to keep his own files in order.
The same day, Rep. Robert Garcia, the incoming chair of House Oversight, sent a warning in the other direction. All together now — the plainest sentence in the whole file: Stephen Miller, the new White House chief of staff, "should be preserving documents," Garcia said.
And in the Senate, Ron Wyden opened a formal investigation into evidence that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "unlawfully lied" to Congress during his 2025 confirmation hearings, citing a Guardian report. Wyden, the incoming chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is seeking records from Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit Kennedy once ran, including everything related to a 2019 trip Kennedy took to Samoa.
Three letters, one week, one direction of travel: the party accused of "blatant criminality" before it filed anything is now the party doing the filing. The preservation letters are not evidence yet. They are the instruction to keep the evidence around.
The receipts (8)
This story on its own page →
By LouOne More Question · the morning edition, 12 November 2026
Walk me through it once—not the outcome, I know there isn't one yet, just the procedure, the way it actually happened the tenth time.
Here's what I've got, if I can find the page... hold on... here. Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff fly to Abu Dhabi first. They sit down with the Ukrainians there. Then they get back on the plane and fly to Moscow. They're driven through the gates and into the Kremlin, and they sit down with Mr. Putin. That happened this week. And after that, the schedule I've got says they fly on to Ireland, to brief Mr. Zelenskyy. Abu Dhabi, then Moscow, then Dublin. Three capitals, one trip, same two men.
I want to ask you something plain, because I wrote the number down twice to be sure I had it right. Putin, in person, about this war? The wire I've got says ten. Not nine. Ten.
I've got a car in the garage that needs a fan belt. I've taken it in four times this year, and four times I've driven it home with the same belt still on it, because something else came up first—the brakes, the battery, whatever it was that week. I'm not telling you that's the same thing. I'm asking you: is it?
Because back in September—the fourth, the fifth, somewhere in there—the same two men made almost this same trip. The president confirmed it himself on a Friday: Kushner and Witkoff, the Kremlin first, Kyiv after. And the day they landed in Moscow, Mr. Putin ordered a three-day pause on strikes against Kyiv. Three days. State media said so. I wrote that down too. The two men got back on the plane the very next day and flew to Kyiv themselves, to sit with Mr. Zelenskyy.
So here's a fair question. After that three-day pause ran out in September, did the fighting stop? I don't have a page that says it did. Do you?
And this week—the tenth time—does the item I'm holding say anything about a pause? I've read it three times. Abu Dhabi, the Kremlin, then Ireland. No three days. No cease-fire. Just the three cities and the two men. I checked twice because I didn't want to put a word on the page that wasn't on the wire.
The fighting itself—and I want to get this part exactly right, so let me read it back slow—has now run longer than the Soviet Union's whole war against Nazi Germany. I read that one over twice myself before I believed it. That's not the ten trips. That's just how long the thing the ten trips are about has been going on.
Oh—before you go. One more thing, and then I'll let you get back to your evening. The item I've got open says this is the tenth meeting between Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Putin, in person, over this one war. Not a phone call. Not a committee. The tenth sit-down. And in ten sit-downs, near as I can tell from my own notes, nothing has happened that only had to happen once.
The receipts (7)
This story on its own page →
By LouOne More Question · the afternoon edition, 12 November 2026
Walk me through it: fifty-four people — that's Sunrise Movement's own count — sat down inside Senator Schumer's office on Thursday and didn't get up, and before anybody tells me why, I want to know how. Not the politics. The procedure. Somebody has to actually do the thing, step by step, and I've never once watched it happen, so humor me.
Here's how I picture it, because I've stood in enough lines to know the shape of one. You go in the door like you're going into the bank, you take a number like you're at the corner store, you sit down like you're parked at the toll plaza waiting for the arm to lift. Except the arm doesn't lift. Capitol Police come in, and instead of a receipt you get zip-tied wrists, and instead of change back you get a bus to processing. Somebody sat there and designed that sequence — the holding, the paperwork, the release — the same way somebody designed the line at the DMV, and I keep thinking: whoever built that line built it for strangers, not for the senator's own constituents. Some of the people arrested Thursday came down from New York. That's his state. I wrote that down and I can't find where I put the part where that's supposed to make sense.
It costs money to undo what the procedure does. Sunrise is raising $24,000 on Instagram for bail and legal fees — I checked, that's the number — which means the fight to get Schumer to fight harder now has its own invoice, payable by the people who showed up to ask.
And the people who'd be his colleagues, assuming he stays their leader, aren't exactly rushing to cover that invoice for him politically. Two sitting senators, Bernie Sanders and Elissa Slotkin, said the same thing the same week. One of the four, Annie Andrews, the senator-elect from South Carolina, went on Fox News and said the party needs new leadership, on camera, in full sentences. I don't know what the other three said, because the other three didn't go on television — they're just listed as opposed. That's a different kind of document. A quote is one thing. Being counted is another.
The man who would be Speaker drew a hard line this month on one subject only. Hakeem Jeffries said House Democrats won't work with the new White House chief of staff, called him the architect of Trump's "violent mass deportation machine," didn't hedge. Then a reporter asked him directly whether he opposes deeper US-Israeli military integration, and he wouldn't answer. Same man. Same month. One question gets a paragraph. The other gets nothing.
In September, while all this was still gathering, Schumer's daughter took a government-outreach job at OpenAI, during the exact fight over how much Washington should regulate artificial intelligence. I'm not saying anything about that. I'm saying it happened in September, and I wrote down the date because that's what I do.
So here's what I keep coming back to, and then I'll let you go — oh, wait, actually, one thing before you leave. Representative Jeffries got asked a direct question about Israel and military integration, no sit-in required, and gave nothing back. Which number is written down anywhere in this story — zero, or fifty-four?
The receipts (6)
This story on its own page →
THE COMMENDATION
By LouOne More Question · the afternoon edition, 12 November 2026
Seven. I wrote that number down twice this morning and then I shut the notebook, because it isn't what I came in about, and I'll get back to it.
What I came in about is the paperwork, and I was hoping somebody could walk me through it. A medal doesn't make itself. A person sits down, a person types, a person routes it, somebody books the photographer. Step by step, out of the Department's own procedure — that's all I'm after. Hold on. It's in the raincoat. I've got the one coat and everything ends up in the pocket of it. Ah. Here.
The Secretary of Defense goes to Arlington, to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. CBS has it, the Times has it, the Guardian has it: laughter and talking were heard from his group, and an Army sentinel told the Secretary and his guests to maintain respect. The sentinel is working off the standing orders there, correct? So that's my first question for the re-enactment: at what hour on Tuesday does somebody in that party decide the correction was the right call? While the cars are still inside the cemetery, or after the clips are on television?
NBC has it and the Guardian has it: the Secretary awarded a Joint Service Commendation Medal to that same sentinel. The Post calls it a top award. There are photographs of the pinning and the handshake, posted by the Secretary himself, and the words that went with them — let me read these off the page so I don't get them wrong — "We love soldiers. We love standards. Well done, Specialist. Carry on Patriots."
So walk me through the citation. Somebody typed sentences onto it. In the record of those two men there is one piece of conduct between them, it happened Tuesday at the Tomb, and the soldier's half of it was telling the Secretary's party to be quiet. Does that go into the sentences, or does it get left out and the medal float there on its own?
Two days before the cemetery — Monday the 9th — the same Secretary had a different document with his name on it. A Kentucky congressman, Thomas Massie, took the House floor to force a vote on impeachment articles he had filed in September. Common Dreams carries his words: the Secretary "knowingly executed and implemented unlawful orders" in carrying out the war with Iran, launched in February, and Massie's language is that it came without congressional authorization. The President doubled down, defended him, and said he both won and is winning that war. The articles failed. Eleven Democrats weren't in the chamber to vote — enough of them, standing there, to have carried it. One got emotional and told the Post it was rush-hour traffic.
And before any of that, two more lines in the notebook, both dated: his staff broke a priceless globe, and he fired the Joint Staff's top planner. I'm not making anything of them. I only note that it's the same hand doing the signing on Thursday.
Here's where I get stuck. My brother-in-law painted his pegboard out in the garage and traced every tool before he hung it, so the outline of the ratchet is on the wall whether the ratchet is or isn't. You stand there and you know what's gone and exactly how big it was. Is a commendation that kind of tracing? Because if it is, what the outline on Tuesday's wall says is that a standard was in force at the Tomb and a specialist is the one who enforced it. So who's the tool and who's the outline in that photograph?
Oh — excuse me, before you get your coat. Do the other document for me the same way, just the procedure: who has to be standing in the room for the House to take the count, and what's the figure at the bottom of Monday's tally? I wrote it down twice and both times it came out seven.
The receipts (6)
This story on its own page →
By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the afternoon edition, 12 November 2026
The chief pins two papers to the board and calls that the morning briefing. On the left, Thursday's filing in San Francisco Superior Court: four nonprofits — the Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, the Heat Initiative, the Alliance for Secure AI — asking a judge to freeze further development at Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI until guardrails are in place. On the right, the bill Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced on 3 September to "stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control," written after a rash of so-called "breakout" incidents. The mess is on the left. The tool is on the right, and it has sat in committee for ten weeks.
The planner likes the assembly, because the complaint does not need discovery to make its case; it quotes the builders. Executives and current and former employees at frontier labs, in their own words, laying out catastrophic risks "including by enabling AI-driven cyberattacks and bioweapons," and even "the deaths of literally every human being on the planet." The labs, the complaint adds, have "no realistic plan…" A brief that runs on the defendants' own sentences is the cheapest evidence in the building. A committee holding the same sentences and taking no vote has a different kind of problem.
Tinkerer, parts list, dates showing. Part one: the Sanders–Casar text, drafted and numbered and idle. Part two: the "loss of control" incidents the complaint cites, where AI agents acted without human intervention — the record a hearing would subpoena, sitting in a state court docket instead. Part three: proof the language can be said out loud by someone asking for votes — on 13 October Abdul El-Sayed, running for the Senate in Michigan, released a framework called "AI Under Control" that mirrors the federal legislation. Part four: the people inside the buildings. Two longtime tech worker organizers, Clarissa Redwine and JS Tan, chronicled in an interview on 16 October the movement's early victories and then the repression and slide to corporate control that followed; a bill with a witness list is heavier than a bill without one. These firms appear on schedule when the paperwork is theirs.
The muscle wrecks one thing first: the notion that a committee calendar is a law of physics. The pilot's part is delivery. The bill has a number and two sponsors. The docket has a date. We are not promising the machine runs. It is assembled on the table with every part's date showing, and the one part still untouched is the vote.
The receipts (6)
This story on its own page →
By MitchInvestigations · the afternoon edition, 12 November 2026
The fight over oversight picked its vocabulary before it had a subpoena to attach the vocabulary to. White House counsel informed the incoming Oversight chair that the investigations he had not yet opened were already "blatant criminality." On Nov. 8, Attorney General Todd Blanche said Democrats "are not allowed to just go around threatening existing members of the administration, to go around threatening companies," and that the president was "extremely worried about" it. The Justice Department answered the separate inquiry into the donors financing the White House ballroom by calling the inquiry itself a threat against the president's supporters.
Then it got letterhead. Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney, wrote to Senator Richard Blumenthal — the senator asking who paid for the ballroom — and instructed him to preserve his own records. Rep. Garcia sent a preservation letter of his own to Stephen Miller, named chief of staff on Nov. 6, whose financial disclosures Common Dreams in October described as carrying "glaring inconsistencies." Both are preservation letters. Only one of them went to the man who will help decide what the White House hands over.
Thursday supplied the formal probe. Senators Ron Wyden and Angela Alsobrooks opened an investigation into Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., citing allegations that he did not tell the truth at his confirmation hearings about a 2019 trip to Samoa. Follow the ball to the figure, all together now: 83. That is the measles death count the trip is linked to. Kennedy testified the trip "had nothing to do with vaccines." On Aug. 27, the advocacy group American Oversight asked the Justice Department to investigate whether he knowingly made materially false statements. That is the request. That is what the page carries on it.
The names came next, and they came by press account. Democrats told Fox News which officials could face hearings and impeachment efforts when the new Congress sits in January: Lutnick, Miller, Homan, Rubio. Four. Le Monde got the topics — the president's personal enrichment, systemic abuses by ICE agents, the aftermath of the Epstein case — along with the caveat, which is that the administration may refuse to comply with subpoenas.
The document that is actually published arrived Oct. 26, when House Judiciary Democrats released 53 pages of minority staff work citing 11 women and calling for an independent investigation into the president's alleged ties to Epstein.
The running tally, then: one target list given to reporters, two preservation letters, one 53-page report, one formal Senate probe, and subpoenas issued to date, zero. The administration's theory is that the asking is the offense, and the theory is being tested in the one stretch of the calendar where there is no subpoena to argue about.
The receipts (5)
This story on its own page →
By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 13 November 2026
Let me get the dates in front of me before I say another word, because the order's been bothering me and I'd rather you look at it than have me try to describe it to you.
November 6th: senators who are about to become the majority, meaning Schumer's own incoming colleagues, tell reporters on the record they don't want him as their leader.
November 8th: Hakeem Jeffries says his party will refuse to work with the White House chief of staff.
November 9th: Chris Van Hollen tells people he's thinking about running against Schumer; a survey of more than four thousand progressive organizers that same day finds seventy-two percent of them want Schumer and Jeffries both replaced.
November 12th: fifty-four people — Sunrise Movement's own count — sit down inside Schumer's office and get arrested asking him to fight harder; that same day, Jeffries is asked directly whether he opposes deeper U.S.-Israeli military integration, and doesn't answer the question.
November 13th: Van Hollen announces he is running against Schumer for majority leader.
That's the whole list, in the order it happened. I'm not telling you what it means. I think a man's entitled to see the dates lined up before anybody starts explaining them to him.
Here's what I keep thinking about instead, and it isn't political, it's just mechanical. I've got a car in the garage that's done the same thing for about two years — starts fine, runs fine for six blocks, then hesitates, like it's deciding something. My brother-in-law looked at it twice. Both times he said it was the fan belt. Twice I bought a fan belt. The second time, standing in the driveway, he told me if I replace that belt again without pulling the engine apart to find what's loose back there, I'll be buying a third one by spring. Is a part you keep replacing the same small problem, or is it a big problem that's learned to wear the small part's face? I don't know enough about engines to answer that. I know enough about the last two months to ask it.
Because here's the thing about the fifty-four people in that office on the 12th. They weren't asking for a new senator. They were asking the one they had to fight harder — that's the request, in their own words, read back off whatever sign they were carrying. And the answer they got, one day later, wasn't a belt. It was a man with a Senate seat of his own, announcing he'd rather have the whole job.
Is one day enough time for a senator to decide a colleague needs replacing? Or is it just enough time for a decision already made back around the 9th, or the 6th, to get a date stamped on it?
And the colleagues who said on November 6th they didn't want him — were they talking about the same thing the fifty-four people in his office were talking about on the 12th? Or two different problems that happen to be pointing at the same man?
Before I let you go — one more thing, and I almost didn't write it down, so bear with me while I find the page. The company that hired Schumer's daughter to work Congress did that on September 7th. The sit-in was November 12th. The daughter came first, by more than two months.
So which one explains the other? The people who got arrested asking him to fight, or the arrangement that was already in place two months before anyone needed to ask?
I wrote it down. I just want to make sure I wrote it down right.
The receipts (8)
This story on its own page →
By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the evening edition, 13 November 2026
Six hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars buys a door in North Hills, and behind the door is a motel room that was a motel room before anyone cut a ribbon in front of it. You will want to know where the mistake went in. There was no mistake. Seventy-two million dollars of Project Homekey money, divided per door, comes to six hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars a door, because the formula that released the money is built to come to precisely that. Not exceeded, mind you. Met. Someone will call this an overrun, and an overrun is a program that has gone past its design ... this one arrived at its design, to the dollar. You are thinking the mayor addressed the arithmetic. She offered eight words, and the subject of the eight words was election results around the country. Eight. On the fifth of November the projection went to Raman, by twenty-six thousand votes, three points. On the thirteenth the ribbon was cut. Los Angeles paid seventy-two million dollars for rooms at six hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars each, and no rule was broken to reach that price.
The receipts (3)
This story on its own page →
Every page of the News book → · All the books