Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment is developing a movie based on Rachel Maddow’s podcast “Ultra,” which centers on the Great Sedition Trial of 1944, according to an individual with knowledge of the project.

Writers Tony Kushner and Danny Strong are in talks to adapt the material into a screenplay.

According to Deadline, which first reported the news, Amblin optioned film rights to the podcast from MSNBC and Maddow’s production company Surprise Inside.

Producing are Spielberg and Kristie Macosko Krieger for Amblin, along with Maddow and Mike Yarvitz for Surprise Inside.

Jack Sweeney, a sophomore at the University of Central Florida, was a big fan of the billionaire industrialist Elon Musk. In 2020, Sweeney launched a Twitter account, @ElonJet, that used public air-travel data to map the flights of Musk’s private jet, thinking it’d be cool to track how Musk managed his business empire......

But Wednesday evening, Musk threatened to escalate the conflict against Sweeney, saying a car carrying Musk’s son, X Æ A-12, had been “followed by [a] crazy stalker” in Los Angeles, implying without providing evidence that location data had been a factor in the purported episode. “Legal action is being taken against Sweeney & organizations who supported harm to my family,” Musk tweeted.

Sweeney, 20, shared publicly available information about Musk’s flights, not his family members or his cars. The records stopped and ended at airports, and Musk has provided no further detail as to what legal basis Musk would cite in a lawsuit......

By Wednesday, an update appeared on Twitter’s private information and media policy that appeared to explicitly prohibit the type of activity conducted by Sweeney’s accounts. The new policy outlawed the sharing of “live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes, actual physical location, or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available.”

The Wayback Machine, an internet archive, showed that the page was updated sometime within the last day. In a tweet late Wednesday, Musk said, “Real-time posting of someone else’s location violates doxxing policy, but delayed posting of locations are ok.”.....

The sudden banning of the jet account, followed by its reversal as new rules were unveiled, potentially adds to the spate of rash decisions Musk has made since taking over Twitter. Musk fired Twitter’s top executives upon arriving, conducted steep layoffs that cut the staff in half and issued an ultimatum to workers to commit to an “extremely hardcore” Twitter or accept a severance package.

Special counsel Jack Smith has issued a subpoena to local officials in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, for information related to the 2020 election, a spokesperson for the county told CNN.

“Yes, we received a subpoena from the Department of Justice’s special counsel regarding the 2020 election. We have nothing further to share or provide,” said Amie Downs, the county’s communications director.

The subpoena sent to Allegheny County is the latest in a string of requests for information sent by Smith, who is now overseeing the Justice Department’s sprawling criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Smith’s team has now sent subpoenas to local and state officials in all seven of the key states – Georgia, New Mexico, Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – targeted by former President Donald Trump Trump and his allies as part of their bid to upend Joe Biden’s legitimate victory.

Those efforts included putting forward slates of pro-Trump electors and filing baseless lawsuits. CNN reported this summer that the DOJ issued numerous subpoenas and was seeking information in all seven states where Trump’s campaign convened the false electors as part of the effort to subvert the Electoral College.

But as regular readers know, during that brief window, Meadows shared quite a bit with congressional investigators, including a treasure trove of communications that helped document what transpired behind the scenes as Donald Trump and his allies took steps to overturn the election. Last night, Talking Points Memo advanced the story in dramatic fashion.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows exchanged text messages with at least 34 Republican members of Congress as they plotted to overturn President Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. Those messages are being fully, publicly documented here for the first time. The texts are part of a trove Meadows turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack that was obtained by TPM.

At issue are thousands of text messages, turned over to congressional investigators, which Talking Points Memo obtained ahead of the Jan. 6 committee’s upcoming final report.

It’s worth emphasizing that neither MSNBC nor NBC News have reviewed the materials first-hand. We have, however, reached out for comment to Meadows and key players in this story, and have not yet heard back. Similarly, TPM didn’t get constructive responses from the referenced Republicans, either.

But that doesn’t change the fact that many of the reported texts are both extraordinary and previously unknown to the public. Republican Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, for example, who happens to be a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, alerted the then-White House chief of staff to a segment from a conservative media outlet in which operative Dick Morris insisted that legislators in GOP-led states had the power to “declare” Trump the winner, despite the election results. Republican Rep. Greg Murphy of North Carolina did the same thing, flagging for Meadows an item from a far-right website.

In practice, the challenge is figuring out how to pass it before the new Congress is sworn in three weeks from today. NBC News reported:

The government funding bill is likely the last train leaving the station in the current session of Congress, and a number of other provisions could ride along. Chief among them is a major overhaul of election laws, designed to prevent another Jan. 6 by making it harder for losing presidential candidates to claim victory. Senators have struck a deal on a bill that cleared committee on a bipartisan vote of 14-1 in September.

The plan, by all appearances, is relatively straightforward: Congressional leaders are working on an omnibus spending package that would finance the government through the end of the fiscal year and prevent a shutdown. Just over the last 48 hours, there’s been some progress on reaching an agreement, which would need 60 votes to advance in the Senate.

Once the spending deal is in place — if there’s a deal in place — the next part of the plan would be to attach Electoral Count Act reforms as an amendment, at which point it could all pass together in one big package.

Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who chairs the Senate Rules Committee and who has helped champion the bill, expressed confidence to NBC News that this will work out.

“We will get this done by the end of the year if I have to slow everything else down,” the Minnesotan said in an interview. “It’s going to happen.”