Closing summary
New details emerged about the federal government’s alarm over the trove of documents Donald Trump kept at Mar-a-Lago, which allegedly included secret materials that were supposed to be in the custody of the National Archives. Meanwhile, voters in New York and Florida are casting ballots in primary elections, which will set the stage for showdowns in the November midterms.
Here’s a rundown of today’s events:
Two men were found guilty for plotting to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.
The Republican senator in charge of winning the party a majority in Congress’ upper chamber went on vacation even as GOP candidates appeared to be struggling in key races nationwide.
The January 6 committee interviewed Trump’s former national security adviser, according to a report.
In Colorado, a Republican state senator left the party for the Democrats, saying he couldn’t abide by its stance on climate change or its embrace of 2020 election denial.
He may be a rival of Trump but fellow Republican and Florida governor Ron DeSantis joined in on attacking the FBI for searching the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort. He also released an advertisement attacking the news media.
The Internal Revenue Service is launching a safety review after Republicans attacked the agency during their campaign to derail the Biden administration’s plan for lowering healthcare costs and carbon emissions, the Washington Post reports.
The plan, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act and signed into law earlier this month after winning passage in the Democrat-controlled Congress, also allocates $80bn to the IRS over the next 10 years. The tax authority has complained of underfunding, but Republicans seized on the infusion of money to claim that armed agents would soon be going through Americans’ bank accounts. In reality, it’s not yet clear how the funds will be used, and only a minority of the IRS’s employees carry weapons, chiefly those involved in criminal investigations.
“We see what’s out there in terms of social media. Our workforce is concerned about their safety,” IRS commissioner Charles Rettig told the Post in an interview. “The comments being made are extremely disrespectful to the agency, to the employees and to the country.” Union officials in the story also say employees are worried about their safety amid the rightwing attacks.
Here’s more from the Post’s report:
In a letter to employees sent Tuesday, he wrote that the agency would conduct risk assessments for each of the IRS’s 600 facilities, and evaluate whether to increase security patrols along building exteriors, boost designations for restricted areas, examine security around entrances and assess exterior lighting. It will be the agency’s first such review since the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people.
“For me this is personal,” Rettig wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Post. “I’ll continue to make every effort to dispel any lingering misperceptions about our work. And I will continue to advocate for your safety in every venue where I have an audience. You go above and beyond every single day, and I am honored to work with each of you.”
Updated
