“Our intelligence agencies completely dropped the ball,” said Sen. Gary Peters, chair of the Homeland Security Committee, to The New York Times. He added: “Despite a multitude of tips and other intelligence warnings of violence on Jan. 6, the report showed that these agencies repeatedly—repeatedly—downplayed the threat level and failed to share the intelligence they had with law enforcement partners.”

On Jan. 2, Parler sent the FBI a post reading, “[t]his is not a rally and it’s no longer a protest. This is a final stand where we are drawing the red line at Capitol Hill. … don’t be surprised if we take the #capital building.” Another said, “[p]eaceful protests have long gone … Everyone is coming with weapons. They may be concealed at first but if congress does the wrong thing expect real chaos because Trump needs us to cause chaos to enact the #insurrectionact.”

“There is a potential tragedy unfolding with the submarine that is getting, you know, minute-to-minute coverage all around the world. And it’s understandable because we all want and pray that those folks are rescued,” he said, hours before it was announced that those on board died instantly after the craft imploded. “But the fact that that’s gotten so much more attention than 700 people who sank—that’s an untenable situation.”

“When you are a citizen of the world, you always think about the world instead of the United States,” Watters began derisively. “Remember, this is a guy whose father has roots in Africa. This is a guy who spent a lot of his childhood in Southeast Asia… and then spent a lot of time in Hawaii.”

“He’s never really looking at things from an American perspective,” Watters griped of the 44th president of the United States. “He’s always speaking to the world. Even when he’s speaking to us, he’s appealing to the world.”

Jeffrey Katzenberg has some Hollywood role models in mind as he urges the nation’s first octogenarian president to embrace his age.

The movie mogul has joined with other advisers in counseling President Biden to “own” his age and turn it into an asset, according to people familiar with the conversations. If Harrison Ford, 80 years old, can star in a new Indiana Jones movie and the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, who turns 80 next month, can strut around a stadium stage, Katzenberg says, then Biden should lean into his longevity as a sign of wisdom and experience while offering a sense of humor about it.

Escalating infighting among the hard-right House Freedom Caucus has pushed some members to consider kicking certain colleagues out of the group—one of whom may be Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), according to Politico. According to the outlet, at least two members have discussed “trying to boot members who no longer meet the group’s standards.” While sources who discussed the matter didn’t name names, Greene was signaled as a potential target, Politico reports, after she formed a close relationship with Speaker Kevin McCarthy and been openly disparaging of the group when it is divided over specific issues. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), a member of the Freedom Caucus, said he was not suggesting kicking her out, but said of Greene: “She’s been critical of us for a long time.” The report comes after The Daily Beast reported that Greene called her Freedom Caucus colleague Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a “little bitch” on the House floor on Wednesday amid a feud about their competing resolutions to impeach President Joe Biden.

Secrets are a kind of currency. They can be hoarded, but if kept for too long they lose their value. Like all currencies, they must, sooner or later, be used in a transaction—sold to the highest bidder or bartered as a favor for which another favor will be returned. To see the full scale of Donald Trump’s betrayal of his country, it is necessary to start with this reality. He kept intelligence documents because, at some point, those secrets could be used in a transaction. What he was stockpiling were the materials of treason. He may not have known how and when he would cash in this currency, but there can be little doubt that he was determined to retain the ability to do just that.

It defines the scandal as, in the words of Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman in The New York Times, “Mr. Trump’s indifference toward the country’s most sensitive secrets.” But this is not a tale of indifference. Trump cared a great deal about the value of the documents. He cared enough, per the indictment, to suggest that his attorney lie to the FBI and a grand jury about what papers he did or did not have. Even Trump does not engage in a criminal conspiracy purely for its own sake. The retention of those boxes mattered to him because he understood the market value of what they contained.

1. According to American Oversight, “Jared Kushner received approval from the Office of Government Ethics (in January of 2017), which allowed him to work in the White House, and it was initially reported that Ivanka Trump would not take a formal role in the administration. After it was announced in late March 2017 that she would officially become a federal employee in the White House, American Oversight submitted FOIA requests seeking communications between Ivanka Trump and several federal agencies, eventually filing a lawsuit against the agencies for failure to respond”

2. Sometime, around July 14, 2017, Kushner updated a federal disclosure form needed to obtain a security clearance three times and added more than 100 names of foreign contacts through the updates after initially providing none at all.”

3. ”For more than a year, Kushner only had a temporary security clearance, but he was allowed to access sensitive national security information that very few people had access to. He attended classified briefings, and read Trump’s daily briefings.” Kushner evidently asked for more top secret material than anyone else.

4. “In September 2017, documents released by American Oversight as well as independent news reports confirmed that both Kushner and Ivanka Trump had been using personal, private email accounts during their time working in the White House. Reports also surfaced that they had set up a private server, ijkfamily.com, in December 2016 in preparation for Kushner to join the White House.”

4. On February 23, 2018, after the Rob Porter scandal (He was Trump’s top aide who had frequent access to him, and had to resign because he had beaten two of his ex-wives), Chief of Staff John Kelly reviewed the security clearance operation. At that time, Kelly downgraded Jared Kushner's security clearance "Interim Top Secret" to "Interim Secret," and downgraded the clearances of other White House staff members as well.

When asked by reporters about this, Trump said Kelly was given the responsibility to do this, and yet Trump kept on pushing Kelly to find out when Kushner would receive his permanent security clearance.

5. In May of 2018, “According to four officials who spoke with the NYT, then-White House counsel Don McGahn recommended to the president that his son-in-law not receive the top security clearance, after an FBI background check determined that foreign officials could possibly maintain some sort of sway over Kushner, due to his business holdings. The next day, President Trump ordered then-Chief of Staff Kelly to override concerns and grant Kushner the high-level clearance. The action was such a concern to McGahn and Kelly — who both left the White House in 2018 — that each wrote up an internal memo outlining the precedent-breaking action.”