Today’s edition of quick hits.
* On campus protests: “President Joe Biden on Thursday urged that ‘order must prevail’ as pro-Palestinian protests rock college campuses across the country, emphasizing that violent protest is not protected under the law.”
* In New York: “Jurors in the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump heard a secret recording on Thursday of Mr. Trump and his longtime fixer, Michael D. Cohen, discussing a deal shortly before the 2016 election to buy the silence of a Playboy model who claimed to have had a 10-month affair with Mr. Trump. The existence of the recording, made by Mr. Cohen about two months before the election, was previously known. But it demonstrated for the jury the direct involvement of the future president in what prosecutors have said was a conspiracy to help him get elected.”
* Important Senate testimony from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines: “China has helped shift the battlefield momentum in Russia’s favor in Ukraine by providing it with components and other material needed to sustain its defense industry, the top U.S. intelligence official told senators Thursday.”
* The latest Jan. 6 sentence, Part I: “Jack Wade Whitton, a Georgia man who dragged an officer down the steps of the U.S. Capitol while wearing a ‘Trump 2020’ hat on Jan. 6 and bragged he ‘fed’ the officer to the mob, was sentenced to more than four years in prison on Thursday. ‘You’re gonna die tonight!’ Whitton admitted yelling at officers during one of several assaults he committed on law enforcement at the lower west tunnel.”
* The latest Jan. 6 sentence, Part II: “A Donald Trump fanatic who assaulted officers with pepper spray and called for additional violence after the Capitol attack while confessing in the third person was sentenced to more than five years in federal prison and fined $200,000 on Thursday. Ryan Nichols pleaded guilty in November to one felony count of obstruction of an official proceeding and one felony count of assaulting officers performing their duties.”
* In North Carolina: “President Joe Biden detoured to Charlotte on Thursday to meet the families of law enforcement officers shot to death on the job, just a week after he sat down with the grieving relatives of two cops killed in upstate New York. Biden was headed to a speech in Wilmington, North Carolina, and added on the visit to see the families, as well as officers wounded in the shooting.” * Important research: “Major oil companies have misled Americans for decades about the threat of human-caused climate change, according to a new report released Tuesday by Democrats in Congress. The 65-page report was the result of a three-year investigation and was made public hours before a Senate Budget Committee hearing about the role that oil and gas companies have played in global warming.” * They struck the wrong man: “A U.S. drone strike in Syria last year killed a 56-year-old shepherd after confusing him for a terrorist leader, an internal investigation concluded, underscoring the Pentagon’s persistent struggle to avoid unintentional casualties despite the Biden administration’s pledge to curb such incidents.” See you tomorrow.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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