Prime
Where Things Stand: Trump’s Own Impeachment Lawyer Sued Him Last Year 
As if we needed more evidence after yesterday’s performance that Trump’s hodge-podge legal defense wasn’t going great, this morning we learned that one of his own lawyers sued him last year.
And he sued him over the very issue that he will be defending the ex-president against.
The GOP’s Paramilitary Wing
If you’re a regular TPM Reader the topic of militias and rightist paramilitaries, which have been in the news since January 6th, is nothing new to you. Many of us have been watching this development going back at least 25 years. The roots of the phenomenon of course go back decades further. It has been a hallmark of our coverage for twenty years that ‘fringe’ right wing groups are much more central to what drives national politics than establishment reportage allows. Today we see that reality come to the fore in a newly visible way as state Republican parties especially cultivate highly armed paramilitaries as auxiliaries to their work in electoral politics.
From TPM Reader AB …
I hadn’t fully realized what the change for me personally was until this afternoon while watching the video that the House Managers showed of the insurrection. It wasn’t seeing the terrorists storming the building, it was before that. It was listening to him speak as President on the Ellipse. At that moment I realized how he had affected me. I remembered how hard it was to listen to him speak without getting angry in a way that no other politician, Republican or Democrat, had done. Then after that moment seeing the video of the insurrection reminded me of the rage I felt on the sixth. I finally understand in just a small way, how people with PTSD are triggered. The feeling was visceral and frightening. Again, this was not just the video of the mob, it was also video of the President’s speech. I now realize the relief that I felt, while slow to materialize, is real, and way bigger than I thought it was.
Where Things Stand: Today Isn’t Really About What Trump Did
Democrats have plenty of compelling evidence against the former president — mostly because everything he’s being impeached for, he did out loud, very much in the open.
TPM Reader JL follows up on my post about the size the recovery package. This is the logical risk of too large a package. What I referenced yesterday was what seemed most salient from Summer’s column: even Summers, as the spokesman for traditional deficit concern and austerity, himself only seemed able to make a half-hearted argument about building up inflationary pressures in the economy. And that to me was the most telling thing about it.
If GA Pushes Through Voter Restrictions, A Legal Battle Will Follow
Where Things Stand: There’s A Lot We Don’t Know One Day Out
Ex-President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in the Senate is set to begin tomorrow and there’s very little we know definitively about how proceedings will work — aside from the fact that Trump himself has no plans to make an appearance.