President Biden and his team have begun responding faster and more sharply to provocative comments and actions by former president Donald Trump and his allies, potentially preparing the ground for Biden’s expected reelection announcement early next year.

The rapid responses, coming in the weeks since Democrats outperformed expectations in the November midterms, come as some Democratic strategists see a political advantage in pointedly — and frequently — drawing a contrast with Trump, the Republican Party, and the Republican lawmakers poised to take over the House of Representatives.

After Trump hosted two outspoken antisemites for dinner last month, Biden tweeted a blunt condemnation of bigotry, second gentleman Doug Emhoff hosted a summit for Jewish leaders, and the White House launched a new task force to combat antisemitism......

White House officials deny this is an electoral strategy, saying Biden is doing more naming and shaming in part because there has been a troubling increase in harmful and shameful rhetoric. When Biden met with historians at the White House earlier this year, they told him it is important to forcefully confront extremism to prevent it from seeping into the mainstream, officials said.

Aides have also said Biden is criticizing Trump in part because Republican leaders are not, an argument that seeks to taint the broader Republican Party with the comments of its most incendiary members......

Biden himself then chimed in on Dec. 2, implicitly rebuking Trump for the dinner and for failing to publicly reject the views espoused by his dinner guests. In a tweet that rapidly went viral and became one of the most popular of his presidency, Biden offered a blunt retort without naming Trump directly.

“I just want to make a few things clear: The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure,” the president wrote in the post, which was liked more than 600,000 times. “And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting antisemitism wherever it hides. Silence is complicity.”

The Biden White House launched its first major broadside in response to incoming House Republicans likely to spearhead aggressive oversight of the administration.

A top lawyer for the president pledged in letters to those members that the administration would operate in good faith with them. But he also said that oversight demands made by congressional Republicans during the last Congress would have to be started over.

In respective letters to Reps. James Comer (R-Ky) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber said that the Biden administration had no immediate plans to respond to a slew of records requests that both men made the past several weeks. In those letters, obtained exclusively by POLITICO, Sauber described such requests as constitutionally illegitimate because both Jordan, who is expected to chair the House Judiciary Committee, and Comer, who is expected to head the Oversight Committee, made them before they had any authority to do so.

“Congress has not delegated such [oversight] authority to individual members of Congress who are not committee chairmen, and the House has not done so under its current Rules,” wrote Sauber, one of the White House’s top oversight lawyers.

Sauber did not rule out satisfying the requests once the next Congress is sworn in. But his letter nevertheless represents the first volley in what is likely to be a contentious and potentially litigious two years between House Republicans and the Biden White House. More narrowly, it is an apparent effort to shield the administration from a hail of potential subpoenas in early January by describing them as an abuse of the normal process of congressional oversight.

Floridians didn’t seem to mind: Four years after the governor won by 0.4% of the vote, falling short of the 50% threshold, DeSantis cruised to a landslide victory last month. Nearly 60% of voters in the Sunshine State either approved of his culture war or didn’t consider it a deal-breaker.

But it’s hard not to wonder just how many Floridians appreciate the cost of the GOP crusade — not just as a substantive matter, but as a financial matter. The Miami Herald reported:

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political strategy has won national attention for his ability to shrewdly select culture war issues and use a compliant Florida Legislature to advance them. But while the agenda has drawn more than 15 lawsuits, it has so far yielded few legal victories, and cost Florida taxpayers nearly $17 million in legal fees to date.

The Republican has lost far more of these legal fights than he’s won. The Herald added, “In case after case, courts have scaled back, thrown out, or left in legal limbo rules and laws that impose restrictions on social media giants; limit voting; curb gender-related health care; influence speech in the workplace, college campuses and classrooms; and create new crimes for peaceful protests.”

The litigation isn’t free: To date, Florida taxpayers have had to pay at least $16.7 million to defend DeSantis’ culture war agenda, which by any fair measure, has suffered a series of embarrassing defeats in the courts.......

In theory, Floridians should have a problem with this. After all, it’s their money, not his, which could be invested in priorities that actually benefit the state. But so long as his constituents shrug their shoulders, DeSantis will keep picking fights he expects to lose, basking in the adulation of Republicans at the national level who care far more about the governor’s willingness to push his crusade than his unfortunate win-loss record in court

Floridians didn’t seem to mind: Four years after the governor won by 0.4% of the vote, falling short of the 50% threshold, DeSantis cruised to a landslide victory last month. Nearly 60% of voters in the Sunshine State either approved of his culture war or didn’t consider it a deal-breaker.

But it’s hard not to wonder just how many Floridians appreciate the cost of the GOP crusade — not just as a substantive matter, but as a financial matter. The Miami Herald reported:

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political strategy has won national attention for his ability to shrewdly select culture war issues and use a compliant Florida Legislature to advance them. But while the agenda has drawn more than 15 lawsuits, it has so far yielded few legal victories, and cost Florida taxpayers nearly $17 million in legal fees to date.

The Republican has lost far more of these legal fights than he’s won. The Herald added, “In case after case, courts have scaled back, thrown out, or left in legal limbo rules and laws that impose restrictions on social media giants; limit voting; curb gender-related health care; influence speech in the workplace, college campuses and classrooms; and create new crimes for peaceful protests.”

The litigation isn’t free: To date, Florida taxpayers have had to pay at least $16.7 million to defend DeSantis’ culture war agenda, which by any fair measure, has suffered a series of embarrassing defeats in the courts.......

In theory, Floridians should have a problem with this. After all, it’s their money, not his, which could be invested in priorities that actually benefit the state. But so long as his constituents shrug their shoulders, DeSantis will keep picking fights he expects to lose, basking in the adulation of Republicans at the national level who care far more about the governor’s willingness to push his crusade than his unfortunate win-loss record in court

Special counsel John Durham’s investigation proved to be a rather embarrassing failure. As The Washington Post reported, it also proved to be quite expensive.

The special counsel appointed to review the FBI’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign has so far cost taxpayers more than $6.5 million, according to a Justice Department report released Friday. ... The special counsel’s work appears to be winding down, but the Justice Department has not yet announced when it will end.

In other words, the $6.5 million figure — in taxpayer money — is where things stand now. It’s difficult to say with confidence how much higher the final price tag will eventually end up......

The tale of the tape is brutal:

Two trials
Zero convictions
One provocative resignation
A largely meaningless guilty plea from an obscure figure
A $6.5 million price tag

By any fair measure, this is the most misguided and inconsequential special counsel investigation in the modern history of American law enforcement......

There is a degree of irony to the circumstances: For years, Team Trump insisted that the Russia scandal was pointless but the Durham investigation was real. It now appears these Republicans had it exactly backward: The Russia scandal was real, and the Durham investigation was pointless

Following up on our earlier coverage, the former congressman’s position in the Tar Heel State has taken a significant turn for the worse. The Associated Press reported:

The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation said it has submitted to state prosecutors the findings of its voter fraud probe into Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff to President Donald Trump, who was simultaneously registered to vote in North Carolina and two other states earlier this year. The State Bureau of Investigation announced Tuesday that it has turned over the case file detailing its investigation into Meadows’ North Carolina voter registration and listed residence to Attorney General Josh Stein’s office.

In a statement, the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation said prosecutors with the state attorney general’s office will determine whether to file criminal charges in the case.

In case anyone needs a refresher — the bureau’s investigation took roughly eight months — let’s review how we arrived at this point.

Before and after Election Day 2020, Meadows talked quite a bit about voting irregularities. Like so many members of Donald Trump’s team, the Republican was heavily invested in the demonstrably false idea that there was widespread fraud.

“Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with people just moving around?” Meadows asked in August 2020. He later complained in his memoir about some people casting ballots despite not being “an actual resident of the state they were voting in.”

It was against this backdrop that the public learned that Meadows himself appears to have cast a ballot from his former home state of North Carolina, despite having moved away and no longer being an actual state resident.