JANUARY 2022 - POLITICAL TRENDING NEWS

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 The Supreme Court has rejected former President Donald Trump’s bid to use executive privilege to block a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection from accessing a trove of records created by Trump’s White House.  The ruling on Wednesday opens up a trove of documents to congressional investigators who have sought them to determine Trump’s actions and mindset in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, as well as what he did as his supporters were rioting at the Capitol. 

Joe Manchin made clear that his party’s push to isolate him and fellow centrist Kyrsten Sinema won’t force his hand on rules changes, once again rejecting Democrats' proposed reforms to the Senate’s filibuster rules. The West Virginia Democrat actually seems to welcome the isolation. He told reporters ahead of a Democratic Caucus meeting he would not go along with instituting a talking filibuster, which could be used to evade the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, nor would he entertain a rules change by a simple majority. 

President Joe Biden touted his administration’s efforts to keep schools open during the pandemic on Wednesday as some schools are returning to remote instruction because of the Omicron variant.  Biden said that while some school buildings have temporarily shut down, the vast majority have continued to conduct in-person instruction. He credited billions in funding passed as part of last year’s American Rescue Plan, as well as his administration’s vaccination initiatives, for helping students and educators stay in school and minimize learning disruption. 

The Biden administration will begin making free at-home Covid-19 tests available through a government website starting Jan. 19 — but the public may have to wait a week or longer to receive them.  Households will be able to order four tests at a time through the website COVIDTests.gov and the tests will “typically ship within 7-12 days of ordering,” according to a fact sheet. 

New York Attorney General Tish James on Tuesday night moved to force former President Donald Trump and his two elder children to comply with her probe of the Trump Organization's finances.  James' office filed the court papers in response to the Trumps' attempts to avoid testifying in the investigation. She argued that prosecutors are entitled to documents and sworn testimony from Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai personally approved a secret deal that gave the social network a leg up in the search giant’s online advertising auctions, attorneys for Texas and other states alleged in newly unsealed court filings.  The 2018 deal gave Facebook possibly unlawful advantages when the social network used Google’s advertising exchange, according to allegations by Texas, 14 other states and Puerto Rico in the latest version of their federal antitrust suit against Google.  The two companies denied Friday that the arrangement was illegal. Google also described the lawsuit as baseless and "full of inaccuracies." 

The Justice Department has leveled its most serious charges yet stemming from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, accusing the national leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia and 10 others of seditious conspiracy by plotting to use force to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power a year ago.  Among those charged for the first time in one new grand jury indictment is Stewart Rhodes, a disbarred attorney alleged to have coordinated the attack on the Capitol who has long been of significant interest to federal prosecutors probing the insurrection by Donald Trump supporters. 

Senate Democrats on Thursday blocked a GOP-led effort to impose sanctions on a Russian natural-gas pipeline amid deteriorating talks with Moscow over its military buildup along Ukraine’s eastern border.  The nearly party-line vote, 55-44, came after an aggressive effort by the Biden administration to limit Democratic defections on the legislation, which the White House viewed as a bid to undercut its strategy to deter a Russian invasion. In the end, six Democrats — many of them vulnerable to GOP challengers in November — and all Republicans but one backed the legislation, falling short of the requisite 60 votes. 

Bill de Blasio isn’t running for governor after all — a decision the former mayor announced in a tweet Tuesday morning, after fundraising, seeking endorsements and trying to put together staff for a gubernatorial bid in recent months."I am not going to be running for Governor of New York State, but I am going to devote every fiber of my being to fighting inequality in the state of New York," New York City’s recently-departed mayor wrote on Twitter with a video explaining the news.