A tranche of newly unearthed documents offer a clearer understanding of Team Trump's failed attempt to steal the 2020 election on today's BradCast, in which we also cover yet another better-than-expected Special Election Day for Democrats on Tuesday. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

First, some of the breaking headlines on today's horrific mass shooting at the end of the victory rally for Superbowl champs, the Kansas City Chiefs. Not much is known as of airtime, beyond one dead, more than 15 injured and two (now three) said to be in custody, according to Missouri state officials.

Then, the House GOP, on behalf of the disgraced, twice-impeached former President was finally successful on Tuesday in passing Articles of Revenge Impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The do-over vote follows their embarrassingly botched effort at same last week. This week, they were able to pass the Articles by one single vote, 214-213, against three Republican defectors and a unified Democratic caucus for "charges" that are not even close to the "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" mandated by the Constitution. Both Articles are expected to die, one way or another, over in the Senate, where even Republicans have shown little interest in the charade.

GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson had to get those Articles passed yesterday, however, given what New York voters did on Tuesday, when the seat in the state's 3rd Congressional District, formerly held by disgraced, expelled and indicted con-artist, Rep. George Santos, was flipped from "red" to "blue" by former Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi. He easily defeated Republican Mazi Pilip by almost 8 points in Tuesday's hotly-contested Special Election, according to the latest reported numbers. That was almost twice the margin predicted by even the most optimistic pre-election polls. The Dem victory in New York (and another in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night --- by 36 points!), again underscores the dearth of issues that Donald Trump's dysfunctional Republican Party has to run on or offer voters this year. Had House Repubs waited just one more day to vote on Articles of Impeachment, they would have lost again.

More apparent good news for voters and Democrats this week in Wisconsin, as the Republicans who control the wildly gerrymandered state Senate and Assembly have passed legislation to adopt new legislative district maps in advance of the 2024 elections, as ordered by the state's Supreme Court. The new maps are ones created by Democratic Governor Tony Evers. And though they don't promise a Dem majority for this year's elections, they do appear to be much fairer for voters. For more than a decade the GOP's gerrymandered maps resulted in nearly twice as many Rs as Ds in the state legislature in the otherwise very closely divided state. State Republicans approved Evers maps because they fear if the High Court selects a map it will be even worse for them. Evers has suggested he plans to sign the legislation.

Meanwhile, as Democrats continue to out-perform in 2024 elections, Republicans are busy in court defending their criminal efforts to steal 2020. A fake elector in Michigan on Wednesday testified that he was lied to by party officials that state legislators could select the phony Trump slate of electors over those for Biden, who state voters actually chose. This particular fake elector has decided to cooperate with prosecutors while 15 others are now facing serious jail time for their alleged conspiracy to forge phony Elector certificates.

And this week, we've got new news from the man who invented the fake electors scheme in the first place. A massive trove of emails, text messages and other documents have been turned over to Michigan prosecutors by former Team Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro and obtained by our guest today, investigative journalist JOSH KOVENSKY of Talking Points Memo. He has been detailing the documents in a new multi-part series this week at TPM which explores the attempted coup, hoped-for chaos, and the plan to pressure friendly members of SCOTUS.

Chesebro first dreamt up the fake elector plot for his own home state of Wisconsin in 2020, before he was asked by Team Trump attorneys, such as the disgraced John Eastman and Boris Ephstyn, to apply the same scam for phony electors in about seven swing-states following Trump's loss in November. They would be instrumental to the Trump team's failed legal efforts to steal the election.

The Chesebro documents shed new light on the failed "legal coup" which, as Kovensky reports, was not meant to be a one-day insurrection on January 6th, 2021, but to result in enough legislative chaos and trumped-up "questions" about the veracity of certified election results to force the U.S. Supreme Court to eventually settle the election themselves, ala Bush v. Gore twenty years earlier.

"What they really wanted was a stalemate in Congress" on January 6th, Kovensky explains. "And in that time, they would have used that stalemate to draw the country's attention to Congress, and then use that attention to put forth the campaign's completely nonsensical theories of voter fraud. That was the idea."

"If you talk to people who were around this, they'll say, 'Yeah, the invasion of the Capitol on January 6th destroyed that plan. Because it did draw attention to Congress, but there were no members of Congress there to make the case that there was voter fraud in the election," he tells me.

"The way the legal coup was meant to proceed was by halting the count," as detailed in the new docs obtained and reported out by Kovensky. "That's the key similarity between what the rioters on Jan. 6 ended up achieving by violent means and what the lawyers were trying to achieve just by procedural means. Which was that the count would have been stopped, [but] it would have been stopped indefinitely until potentially the Supreme Court stepped in to act and appoint Trump the winner."

So how did Chesebro --- who, until now, has not appeared, at least, to be a hard-right partisan ideologue along the lines of Eastman and Ephsteyn --- find his way into the vortex of Team Trump and the "legal coup" they were hoping to pull off? What is he hoping to accomplish by turning over these documents to prosecutors in MI and elsewhere since pleading guilty to one felony charge with no jail time in Georgia last year in exchange for testifying against his fellow conspirators? Will Trump be able to use Chesebro's documents and testimony to help himself in his own trials regarding his attempt to steal the 2020 election?

All of those questions and many more asked and answered about "The Cheese" and his documents on today's BradCast...

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Once again today, we try to stuff a 10-pound show into a 5-pound BradCast. Wish us luck! [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]

Among our many stories for your listening pleasure, amusement and outrage today...

• Jon Stewart is back on The Daily Show! At least on Monday nights. At least for this year. And, boy howdy, was he missed. Other than looking about 20 years older, he literally hasn't missed a step over the 9 years since he's been away from the show, both comically and, more importantly, politically. His first night back included an epic opening monologue that framed the various concerns among Democrats about Joe Biden's age in a way that nobody else has or could. Hopefully, it helps to kick off the serious conversation that Democrats need to start having amongst themselves to begin coming to terms with the fact that one of the most effective and, yes, oldest Presidents of our lifetimes (or ever) will be running for re-election this November. We've got lots to say here. But, much more importantly, so did Stewart last night.

• Battling a massive Nor'easter and racing the clock against whatever may happen in the Special Election for U.S. House in New York's 3rd Congressional District tonight, in the contest to fill the expelled Rep. George Santos' seat, House Republicans take a do-over on Tuesday after their embarrassing failed effort last week to Revenge Impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. The first impeachment ever of a sitting cabinet members is not for any actual "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" as required by the Constitution, but for...something something ...border policy...something something. (And because they haven't been able to figure out yet how to Revenge Impeach Joe Biden.)

• After insisting that any new aid package for Ukraine must include a massive new package for the U.S. Border Security. And then after striking a bipartisan deal with Democrats for that Border Security bill they insisted on. And then after insisting that any new aid for Ukraine not include a massive new package for the U.S. Border because Donald Trump told them to kill the Border provisions, because he needed an issue to run on in November....Senate Republicans (some of them anyway) joined Democrats after an all-night filibuster to pass a foreign aid bill for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. House Speaker Mike Johnson, however, has already said he'll do everything he can to keep this National Security measure from ever being allowed up for a vote on the House floor. Because Donald Trump told him to.

• In the greatest tradition of Banana Republic strongmen, Donald Trump is reportedly planning to install his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-Chair of the Republican National Committee and the Chair of his own Campaign as the RNC's Chief Operations Officer. The GOP takeover by a twice-impeached, four-time criminally indicted, one-term failed President is now all but officially complete.

• And then we finally get to the Hur Report today and the corporate mainstream media's epically failed coverage of it's release by Special Prosecutor Robert Hur, who was appointed by Trump to the DoJ. Last week, the Dept. unsealed the full, unredacted, nearly 400-page report [PDF]. Hur was tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland to probe the small number of classified documents that Joe Biden's attorneys discovered at one of his old office spaces and in his home.

  The headline for the report's release should have been "Special Prosecutor Fails to Find Evidence of Crimes in Biden Classified Docs Probe", at least if one bothers to read what Hur actually detailed in the bulk of his report.

  That, as Hur himself points out, by way of contrast to the many reasons that 40 criminal felony counts were brought against Trump under the Espionage Act after he stole tens of thousands of pages of highly classified documents upon leaving office and then refused to return them to the Government.

  "Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite," writes Hur on page 11. "According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview. and in other ways cooperated with the investigation."

  The report went on for hundreds of pages, laying out exculpatory evidence after exculpatory evidence, as former DoJ prosecutors Andrew Weissman and Ryan Goodman detail. That, even as Hur rifled through Biden's personal diaries searching for evidence of a crime, as brilliantly highlighted by national security journalist Marcy Wheeler.

  But the screaming HEADLINE NEWS!!! that our corporate media took away from all of it in dozens and dozens of stories was that the Trump-appointed Hur included remarks in the report having nothing to do with whether Biden should be charged with a crime or not, but that Hur, not a medical professional, describes as the President having a "poor memory" and "diminished faculties".

  And you wonder why our country is going to hell in a handbasket?

• Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report with coverage of a new type of Super Bowl EV ad; The big investment into the Trump campaign by Big Oil and Gas this year; and a jury award of $1 million to Pulitzer Prize-winning climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann in his defamation case against two far-right climate science liars and harassers...

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