Impeaching Mayorkas: Take Two

Happy Friday! As journalists, we spend a lot of time and energy digging up the next scoop. Sometimes it’s a long and laborious process—and sometimes, the New Jersey governor inadvertently adds a reporter to a text thread between him and his staff telling them he’s “white-hot mad.”

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Russia’s prison service said Friday morning that Alexei Navalny—the Russian opposition leader who was poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020 and had been jailed since 2021 and sentenced last year to 19 years in prison on charges of extremism widely viewed as politically motivated—has died at the age of 47. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the prison service was looking into Navalny’s death, which occurred just a month before Russia’s next presidential election, in which President Vladimir Putin is expected to secure a fifth term.
• Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officials said Thursday that a strike in southern Lebanon on Wednesday killed Ali Al-Dabs—a leader of an elite unit of Iran-backed Hezbollah—and his deputy. Hezbollah launched a barrage of rockets into northern Israel yesterday in retaliation, raising concerns of escalation and Israel’s war against Hamas broadening to a new front. Ahead of Israel’s telegraphed offensive into the southern part of the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that Egypt is building a walled enclosure to contain the flood of Palestinian refugees expected to try to flee from Rafah across the border. 
• The Justice Department’s inspector general released a report on Thursday that found the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had endemic problems with negligence, understaffing, and operational failures that ultimately contributed to 344 inmate deaths—almost 200 by suicide—across the system from 2014 to 2021. “Staff did not sufficiently conduct required inmate rounds or counts in over a third of the inmate suicides during our scope,” the DOJ watchdog reported. “We found significant shortcomings in BOP staff’s emergency responses to nearly half of the inmate deaths that we reviewed, ranging from a lack of urgency in responding, failure to bring or use appropriate emergency equipment, unclear radio communications, and issues with naloxone administration in opioid overdose cases.” 
• New York Judge Juan Merchan on Thursday rejected former President Donald Trump’s attempt to dismiss the charges against him in the case brought against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, which alleges the former president falsified business records to pay hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels in an effort to suppress news of the affair ahead of the 2016 election. The case will move forward as originally scheduled, with a jury trial set to begin on March 25.
• Special counsel David Weiss, who is leading an investigation into Hunter Biden, charged Alexander Smirnov, a longtime FBI confidential informant, with lying about President Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s involvement with Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company. In an indictment unsealed yesterday, the DOJ claimed Smirnov lied when he suggested the younger Biden was hired as a paid member of Burisma’s board in order to protect the company—through the influence of his father—from investigation by the Ukrainian prosecutor general. Smirnov also lied, the DOJ alleges, when he suggested the company’s executives paid both Bidens $5 million while Joe Biden was vice president as an incentive to use his political influence to shield the company. “In short, the Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against [Joe Biden], the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against [Joe Biden] and his candidacy,” the indictment says. Smirnov—whose claims were touted by some congressional Republicans for months as they attempted to build an impeachment case against the president—was arrested in Las Vegas on Thursday.
• Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis took the stand on Thursday in an effort to fend off allegations of misconduct. During a hearing on her racketeering case against former President Donald Trump, Willis disputed the testimony of a witness who suggested that she has had an improper relationship with Nathan Wade, one of the prosecutors involved in the investigation. The hearing, which continues today, could affect whether Willis is allowed to remain as the lead prosecutor in the historic case that alleges the former president and more than a dozen co-defendants attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.
• NBC News reported Thursday that the U.S. military conducted a cyber attack earlier this month on an Iranian military vessel collecting intelligence on cargo ships in the Red Sea. The attack—aimed at preventing the ship from transmitting its intelligence to Houthi rebels in Yemen—was reportedly part of the slate of attacks in retaliation for the deaths of three U.S. service members at a base in Jordan late last month. 
• The Justice Department revealed Thursday that, during a January operation, it had “neutralized a network” of hacked small or home office routers infiltrated by the Russian intelligence service (GRU). According to the DOJ, the Russian government used malware developed by a known criminal organization to gather information from “targets of intelligence interest to the Russian government, such as U.S. and foreign governments and military, security, and corporate organizations.” The DOJ, with allied foreign agencies, removed the malware from the affected routers and withdrew future access to the network. 
• White House spokesman John Kirby said Thursday that the Russian anti-satellite technology, about which Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio sounded the alarm earlier this week, poses “no immediate threat to anyone’s safety.” Kirby added, “We are not talking about a weapon that can be used to attack human beings or cause physical destruction here on earth.” U.S. officials, he said, have had knowledge of the Russian weapon for many months and said it had not yet been deployed.

Mayorkas Have Another?

House Republicans learned a valuable lesson in perseverance on Tuesday, bringing to life the age-old adage: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try Mayorkas.

In their second attempt to do so in as many weeks, Republicans voted to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas—by a razor-thin margin of 214-213—on two charges: willfully refusing to comply with the law and breaching public trust. Though he is unlikely to be convicted and removed from his post by the Senate, Mayorkas’ impeachment represents just how bitter the battle over the border has become in Washington. And although both parties admit that the country is experiencing a migrant crisis of historic proportions, tangible legislation to solve the issue seems all but dead.

Mayorkas’ impeachment was the first of a Cabinet secretary since 1876, and it only succeeded this time because House Majority Leader Steve Scalise had returned to work from cancer treatments to cast the deciding vote. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, explained why Republicans had decided to take the step:

First, Mr. Mayorkas willfully refused to comply with the law, blatantly disregarding numerous provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act … Second, Mr. Mayorkas breached the public trust, both by violating his statutory duty to control the border and by knowingly making false statements to Congress. … This transcends mere policy disagreements. The people’s representatives are seeking to address a cabinet official’s unlawful actions, which have clearly harmed the country.

But the impeachment proceedings weren’t only meant as a referendum on the Biden administration’s immigration policy. “Secretary Mayorkas’ refusal to comply with the law is also a direct attack on the separation of powers,” a Homeland Security Committee source told TMD. “Executive branch officials do not get to ignore the laws that Congress has passed, but that is exactly what Secretary Mayorkas has done, as clearly articulated in our articles of impeachment. In fact, he has issued directives and guidance effectively ordering DHS law enforcement not to enforce the law. This simply cannot be tolerated in a constitutional republic built on the separation of powers.” 

Democrats blasted the process as purely political. “Extreme MAGA Republicans … decided to torch the Constitution—once again—to suit their political ends,” Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement released after the vote Tuesday. President Biden remarked that “history will not look kindly” on the “blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship.”

Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who focuses on Congress, said this week’s vote may represent the inevitable politicization of the impeachment process. “Ever since the 2019 to 2020 impeachment of Trump on the Russia stuff, I feel like Republicans have just been itching to do a tit-for-tat retaliation with impeachment,” he told TMD. “The fact that it arguably dilutes the impeachment power, or sort of opens the door to making it a routine, I guess they just feel like that’s as much on the Democrats in 2019 as it is on them.”

Three House Republicans joined all their present Democratic colleagues to vote against the impeachment: Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, and Tom McClintock of California, who argued the move overstepped the constitutional role of impeachment. “In effect, they stretch and distort the Constitution in order to hold the administration accountable for stretching and distorting the law,” McClintock said in a statement released after the first failed vote. Gallagher, who recently announced he will not run for reelection, wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal explaining his no vote: “Creating a new, lower standard for impeachment, one without any clear limiting principle, wouldn’t secure the border or hold Mr. Biden accountable. It would only pry open the Pandora’s box of perpetual impeachment.”

Despite the defections—and what Wallach called an “embarrassing” need to hold the vote twice—House Republicans managed to score a win on Tuesday. “This is a way to bring this issue of border security into the news and make sure everyone is paying attention to it. I think it succeeded at that,” he said. “And it succeeded in bringing the House party together, much better than we might have imagined.”

The articles of impeachment will next be delivered to the Senate, which is expected to move quickly to end the trial and clear Mayorkas. Even some Senate Republicans have expressed doubt about the charges. “It’s not going to result in his removal from office and never was intended to, because you need a two-thirds majority in the Senate,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told TMD. “But it does lay down a marker that the Republicans clearly lay responsibility for the border disaster at the feet of the administration.”

Republicans have long blamed the Biden administration, and Mayorkas in particular, for a worsening crisis at the southern border. Although the number of migrant encounters decreased in January—likely a temporary downturn due to seasonal patterns—that figure had repeatedly come in at record levels in late 2023. Earlier this month, the Senate failed to pass a bipartisan compromise bill intended to mitigate the crisis—pairing border security reforms with aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan—after months of negotiations. “It seemed like a big part of why that happened was because the House made it so clear that they were going to try to kill it immediately, not give it any chance,” said Wallach. “And so that made it so a lot of Republicans in the Senate didn’t want to stick their necks out for this deal.” Former President Donald Trump, the current frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary, also came out against the deal. 

Since the collapse of the compromise, the finger pointing in Washington has only gotten worse. “I do think in terms of the border, it is a huge issue,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told The Hill on Thursday. “I think President Biden really mishandled this from the very beginning and I think in his race it’s going to be huge.” The Biden administration, in turn, has knocked House Speaker Mike Johnson for killing the compromise bill. On Wednesday, the White House’s Twitter account posted a “valentine” for Johnson: “Roses are red / Violets are blue / The border deal was crushed / Because of you”

Meanwhile, border security politics are already creeping into electoral politics. The special election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, for example—which former Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi won by eight points—featured both the Republican and Democratic candidates touting their tough-on-illegal-immigration bona fides. That focus on immigration supports polling released by the Pew Research Center yesterday that found 77 percent of respondents consider the situation at the border a “crisis” or “major problem.” Eighty-nine percent of Republicans and 73 percent of Democrats believe that the government has done a bad job handling the border. 

But with an impeached DHS secretary and one killed border bill, is there an appetite in Congress for any kind of immigration reform before the election? In theory, there might be room for another try. “Now that the Senate thing has crashed and burned, the House Republicans might consider taking, you know, one substantive element out of HR 2 and sticking it into the Ukraine bill and sending that to the Senate,” Krikorian said, referencing an immigration reform bill passed by the Republican-controlled House in 2023 that included multiple limitations on immigration that predictably stalled in the Democratic Senate. Krikorian pointed to several conservative proposals—including the inclusion of a “remain in Mexico” policy—that might appeal to House Republicans. While the GOP might be emboldened since their win on impeachment, Democrats could be equally motivated against taking any action. “The question on the Senate side,” Krikorian added, “is would impeachment cause the Democrats to dig their heels in on something like parole limitation or some other measure attached to the House version of the Ukraine bill?”

But with a Senate focused on moving away from the impeachment proceedings as quickly as possible, Wallach believes it’s unlikely that Republicans will be able to use their impeachment as an opening salvo for another round of negotiations. “I have a hard time imagining that the Senate in particular is going to be jolted into acting in any particular way by this impeachment,” he said. “I think they see it as just something that they’re obliged to shepherd into the garbage can.”

Worth Your Time

• Long before there was Bud Light, there was the “Teddy Hat,” a drink that revealed one’s political affiliations. “Enough was enough,” Rachel Lane wrote for Atlas Obscura. “Someone had to challenge the current president for the Republican nomination, and it was going to be him. ‘My hat is in the ring,’ former president Theodore Roosevelt told W. F. Eirick, a local politician in Cleveland, Ohio, on February 21, 1912. And thus began Roosevelt’s run for an unprecedented third term for the presidency. The image of his hat in the ring captured the American consciousness, and the phrase began to appear in newspaper articles, political cartoons, campaign swag like pins, and even sheet music. Although Roosevelt won the vast majority of delegates in states holding primary elections—some states still used the older party-convention style—party leaders supported [President William Howard] Taft and intended to nominate him at the Republican National Convention in Chicago from June 18 to 22, 1912. As delegates began to arrive in the Windy City for the convention, a bartender at the Congress Hotel, Charles W. Svendsen, came up with a new idea for a drink—the Teddy Hat cocktail, capitalizing on the popularity of Roosevelt’s declaration to Eirick. The recipe consisted of orange bitters, raspberry syrup, Dubonnet, gin, and vermouth. Bartenders cut a lemon peel into a shape like the distinctive Rough Rider hat Roosevelt had worn during the Spanish–American War of 1898 and tossed it into the glass—the ‘ring’—with a flourish. How drinkers responded to the lemon revealed their politics. If they tossed it out, they supported Taft. If they kept the lemon in, they supported Roosevelt.” Though Roosevelt himself wasn’t much of a drinker, the recipe for the cocktail in his honor is at the bottom of the story.

Presented Without Comment

NBC News: National Archives Closes After Climate Change Protesters Dump Red Powder on U.S. Constitution 

Also Presented Without Comment

New York Times: [Republican Rep.] Matt Rosendale Ends Short-Lived Senate Campaign in Montana

“He announced his withdrawal less than a week after he formally entered the race. Just hours after he began his campaign, former President Donald J. Trump endorsed Tim Sheehy, a businessman and retired Navy SEAL who was Mr. Rosendale’s opponent in the primary.” 

Also Also Presented Without Comment

The Guardian: OpenAI Launches Tool That Instantly Creates Video From Text

Toeing the Company Line

• Fact checker Alex Demas broke down accusations made against Sen. John Cornyn regarding funding for Ukraine, border security, and Russian disinformation.
• On the podcasts: Sarah is joined on the Dispatch Podcast by Steve and Jonah to discuss the Republican Party’s foreign policy schism.
• On the site: Michael Torres argues that conservatives shouldn’t be fooled by John Fetterman’s not-so-new schtick, and Mackenzie Eaglen explains that most of the money in the Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan aid package that passed the Senate will actually stay in the U.S.

Let Us Know

Do you think DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas deserved to be impeached?