Joe Biden

An official from the U.S. Treasury Department confirmed Friday that, contrary to the unrelenting barrage of lies repeated by GOP operatives for over a week, the Internal Revenue Service is not going to hire 87,000 new agents to harass working people at their homes.

Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that was passed through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process last week and signed into law by President Joe Biden on Tuesday, choosing instead to condemn the package's relatively modest but popular tax reforms.

On Friday, the Washington Examiner reported that a key right-wing political group is committing $2.5 million in TV ads to defending Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), amid sudden fears that he could be vulnerable in a race against an independent candidate.

"Utah is a red state, and Republicans are favored to make gains in Congress amid President Joe Biden’s languishing job approval ratings," reported David M. Drucker. "But the Club for Growth, a conservative advocacy group in Washington, is worried enough about Lee’s prospects that it is now airing a television spot statewide, on broadcast and cable, attacking McMullin as a closet liberal."

CNN's Anderson Cooper reported on the series of excuses Donald Trump has given since the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for classified documents with a chyron reading "keeping them honest" and "let's try *this* one."

"Good evening and welcome to what might be called the 'perfect phone call' stage in the latest scandal involving the former president," Cooper began. "You'll recall, 'perfect phone call' was the phrase the former president used to describe the call that got him impeached. The call in which he tried to strong-arm the president of Ukraine into helping him smear Joe Biden. He called it a perfect phone call after his supporters and enablers had made a slew of excuses about the call, none of which really held up."

In the moments after the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, the administration stressed that President Joe Biden had no advance warning and the White House learned about the law enforcement action from Twitter. But now a "senior administration official" is speaking on the subject through anonymous quotes given to CNN.

The network reported, "White House officials have privately expressed deep concern over the tranche of classified material taken to former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida, including some documents that are only meant to be viewed only in secure government facilities, CNN has learned. As more information has emerged in the days since FBI agents combed the former President’s private residence, current administration officials have become increasingly concerned about what Trump took and whether that information – some located in a basement-level storage facility at Mar-a-Lago – could potentially put the sources and methods of the US intelligence community at risk."

Dr. Mehmet Oz’s U.S. Senate campaign in the key swing state of Pennsylvania has not been going well. Some polls show his Democratic challenger, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, with a double-digit lead, and Oz has been inundated with brutal mockery in response to a shopping video that was meant to disparage President Joe Biden and other Democrats but, according to critics, misfired badly. Fetterman, in fact, has fundraised more than $500,000 from Oz’s widely ridiculed “crudité” video.

MAGA Republicans have been hoping to find a way to derail Fetterman’s campaign. One of them is Steve Bannon, host of the “War Room” podcast and former White House chief strategist in the Trump Administration. But Bannon’s line of attack is being slammed by critics as both ridiculous and desperate; Bannon is implying that Fetterman has a “satanic” appearance. Let's watch to see more.

Donald Trump is complicating GOP efforts to win back Congress as Democrats are increasing their odds of holding both the House and Senate.

"The man in charge of the House GOP’s campaign strategy has been doling out advice to Republican candidates and incumbents in key battleground races as they prepare for the general election: Don’t be distracted by Donald Trump on the campaign trail, and instead focus on the issues Republicans believe will be most salient to voters in the midterms," CNN's Melanie Zanona reported Friday. "The guidance from Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, relayed by three GOP sources familiar with the internal conversations, reflects a tacit acknowledgment among Republican leaders that the former president could knock the GOP’s midterm messaging off course as they seek to recapture the House majority this fall."

Donald Trump regrets endorsing celebrity Dr. Mehmet Oz after his poll numbers have cratered over the summer.

Sources close to the former president says he's increasingly concerned that Oz will lose his Pennsylvania Senate race against John Fetterman, and it's finally starting to sink in with Trump that the polls are not "phony" or skewed, reported Rolling Stone.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis's office on Friday argued that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-GA) should not be allowed to further stall his testimony before a special grand jury on the grounds that it would "delay the revelation of an entire category of relevant witnesses or information."

As flagged by Politico's Kyle Cheney, the Fulton County DA's office argued that Graham's testimony is "crucial" to the investigation because "he is expected to provide information regarding additional sources of relevant information."

More than a year and a half into President Joe Biden's first term, Louis DeJoy—a megadonor to former President Donald Trump and a villain in the eyes of progressives and many Democratic lawmakers—is still running the U.S. Postal Service.

DeJoy's staying power in the face of widespread outrage over his sabotage of postal operations and his ethics scandals, one of which spurred an FBI probe, can largely be attributed to the loyalty of the USPS Board of Governors, a majority of which has remained supportive of the postmaster general amid repeated calls for his ouster over the past two years.

The conventional wisdom that the Republican Party is likely to win control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm election was challenged by Susan Glasser in The New Yorker.

"The results of this midterm season so far have shown how nearly complete Trump’s Republican triumph already is. Dozens of election deniers who have adopted the former President’s lies about his 2020 election loss have won Republican nominations, up and down the ballot," Glasser wrote. "So why are Trump’s opponents—at least some of them—feeling in any way optimistic?"

On Thursday's edition of CNN's "OutFront," election forecaster Harry Enten laid out why Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to tamp down expectations for Republican performances in Senate contests this cycle — and why he particularly knocked his party's "candidate quality."

"Just go to Pennsylvania, for example," said Enten. "Mehmet Oz, 20 points underwater on his favorability. In Georgia, Herschel Walker, minus 5 points. Arizona, Blake Masters, 4 points underwater. And you see that in all those races that we mentioned where the Democrats are ahead, the net favorability of the different Republicans is underwater. Their unfavorable ratings are higher than favorable ratings. This is a long-standing problem with Republicans. We saw it in 2010 as well. They blew it then because they nominated bad candidates in the minds of the voters."