One of the indefensible assertions that’s reemerged in recent days is that social media companies’ efforts to limit sharing of a New York Post story in October 2020 cost Donald Trump that year’s presidential election.

This is a long-standing claim, made newly salient with new Twitter owner Elon Musk’s release last week of internal documents about the decision to impose that limit. His intent was to suggest that pre-him Twitter was a place where conservative arguments were unfairly censored. But others, like former president Donald Trump, have gone further, suggesting that this action alone led to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

There’s no reason to believe this is true......

In other words, in polling terms, there was no statistical difference in how people might have changed their vote after learning jobs numbers versus the claims about Biden and China. Were those jobs numbers muffled by Twitter? Instead of thinking this poll shows how the Hunter Biden story could have changed the election, it’s safer to view it as simply measuring how likely people are to say they would have changed their minds for nearly any reason.

All of this is beside the point of this debate. The point of the debate is, instead, to cast “elites” in the media and technology as inherently oppositional to Republican candidates, meaning, in 2020, Trump. This is a visceral argument, not a rational one, so pointing out that there’s no evidentiary basis for the claim is fighting the wrong fight.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff – the first Jewish person in his position – will convene an antisemitism roundtable Wednesday at the White House, Emhoff’s office tells CNN.

Planning for the event was underway for weeks, but White House aides said that it’s taken on extra significance now following a series of antisemitic comments from the rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, as well as the revelation that former President Donald Trump hosted West along with White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in late November.

“Literally every single day it gets worse,” Emhoff said on Friday, appearing at an event in Washington last week where he described himself as “in pain.”

“Jews in our generation didn’t experience this level of antisemitism at all,” he added. “Like with so many issues, we thought that it was behind us.”

Emhoff, joined by domestic policy advisor Susan Rice, director of public engagement Keisha Lance Bottoms and administration special envoy to combat antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, will bring together leaders of 13 different Jewish groups from the Anti-Defamation League to Jewish on Campus and several religious organizations.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff – the first Jewish person in his position – will convene an antisemitism roundtable Wednesday at the White House, Emhoff’s office tells CNN.

Planning for the event was underway for weeks, but White House aides said that it’s taken on extra significance now following a series of antisemitic comments from the rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, as well as the revelation that former President Donald Trump hosted West along with White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in late November.

“Literally every single day it gets worse,” Emhoff said on Friday, appearing at an event in Washington last week where he described himself as “in pain.”

“Jews in our generation didn’t experience this level of antisemitism at all,” he added. “Like with so many issues, we thought that it was behind us.”

Emhoff, joined by domestic policy advisor Susan Rice, director of public engagement Keisha Lance Bottoms and administration special envoy to combat antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, will bring together leaders of 13 different Jewish groups from the Anti-Defamation League to Jewish on Campus and several religious organizations.

Vice President Kamala Harris will swear in Karen Bass as the 43rd mayor of Los Angeles in an inauguration ceremony on Sunday in a meeting of two Democratic women who have broken barriers in politics.

Bass will make history as the first female mayor of Los Angeles, also making her the first woman of color to hold the job. Harris, just the second-ever Black female US senator, made history when she became the first female, first Black and first South Asian person to serve as vice president.

Bass, who will succeed term-limited Mayor Eric Garcetti, will begin her mayoral term on December 12. When she takes office, the four largest cities in the US will all have Black mayors – that includes Eric Adams of New York City, Lori Lightfoot of Chicago and Sylvester Turner of Houston.

Bass, who was elected to the California state Assembly in 2004, made history some four years later as the first Black woman to serve as speaker of any state legislature.

Bass alluded to her history of firsts shortly after winning her race when she told reporters that the accomplishment of becoming the first female mayor of Los Angeles was still “sinking in.”

“When you’re in a position like this – and I was in a similar position when I was sworn in as speaker – it means that you have extra responsibility. You always have to make sure that you maintain excellence in every step of the way,” Bass said. “The path that you go is laying the foundation for those that come behind you.”

The resulting bill — SB 202 — has been rightly decried as representing a new round of voter suppression in the Deep South state where the demographics are shifting away from the rural white voters that the GOP has relied on. Many of the changes made in the name of “election integrity” were clearly considered a means to hamper Democratic turnout. But we may learn Tuesday that instead of hurting Warnock, the law hindered the odds of a victory by his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker.

Among other things, Georgia’s new voting law changed how runoff elections are conducted. The last runoff Warnock faced came on Jan. 5, 2021, nine weeks after Election Day 2020. In the meantime, Democrats hustled to mobilize the people who had already voted in November and register new voters ahead of the January vote. They also pushed Warnock supporters to vote early by mailing ballots, using drop boxes or showing up in person.

The law shrunk this runoff period to just 28 days. Many of the pandemic-related expansions of early voting access were slashed, which limited the number of drop boxes and the number of days they were available. Also, this time, the last day to register new voters for the run-off election was the day before the primary election. And early in-person voting was shortened from a minimum of 17 days to five days......

But the reduced turnaround hasn’t necessarily been to Walker’s benefit. Numerous organizing issues, and a lack of hustle from the candidate himself, suggest that having such a brief window to sell Walker to voters might have been a mistake, The New York Times reported:

“We almost need a little bit more time for Herschel’s campaign to get everything off the ground,” said Jason Shepherd, the former chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party, pointing to the transition from a general election campaign to a runoff sprint. […] “I think we’re behind the eight ball on this one,” Mr. Shepherd added.

Meanwhile, the provision of the new law that prevents newly registered voters from taking part on Tuesday doesn’t just hurt Democrats: It also means that any Georgians who might have signed up specifically to support Walker couldn’t do so. That might be a problem given how badly Walker underperformed compared to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp last month. (Kemp drew more than 200,000 votes than Walker did.) One of the big questions Tuesday is whether Republicans who supported Kemp then but not Walker will show up and grudgingly vote for him.

The disciplinary hearing over the suspension of the Washington D.C. law license of Rudy Giuliani got contentious Tuesday as he simultaneously tried to distance himself from the lawsuits that were deemed frivolous and admitted to submitting filings with claims for which he did not have evidence.....

He and other attorneys on behalf of Donald Trump have been accused of filing lawsuits for the sake of sowing disinformation rather than in pursuit of justice.....

However, the former New York City mayor also admitted that there were claims his cases made that he and fellow attorneys could not support with evidence, insisting that this was okay, because the evidence would have been recovered during the discovery phase of the proceedings.

Sadly for a former U.S. Attorney, Giuliani also admitted to having fraud allegations restored in one complaint after they had been removed, and his attorney suggested the blame falls on Donald Trump for urging Giuliani to hurry to become familiar with cases in at least ten states immediately after the election. The Washington Post reports:

“Giuliani said the team put information in the complaint that they believed was accurate at the time, but they expected to obtain the facts later…’In discovery you get the additional information. This was specific enough for this stage of the pleading. That’s why it’s evidence, and not a conclusion,’ he argued.”

A Manhattan jury has found two Trump Organization companies guilty on multiple charges of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records connected to a 15-year scheme to defraud tax authorities by failing to report and pay taxes on compensation for top executives.

The Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp. were found guilty on all charges they faced.

Donald Trump and his family have not been charged in this case.

This story is breaking and will be updated.

Tuesday’s showdown between Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D) and Republican challenger Herschel Walker is the product of an unusual general election runoff system that was pushed by a powerful Georgia segregationist who sought to blunt the power of Black voters in the 1960s.

While 10 states use runoffs in primary elections, Georgia and Louisiana are the only two that do so in general elections. Georgia’s system was created in 1964 after the urging of Denmark Groover, who blamed Black voters for a reelection loss and proposed runoffs. Groover later acknowledged the runoff system was intended to suppress Black political representation.

While runoff elections had existed for decades in Southern primaries, Georgia’s enthusiastic adoption of two-round voting came as a way of “ensuring a conservative White candidate won an election,” said Ashton Ellett, a political historian and archivist at the University of Georgia.

“A runoff makes it harder for folks who have less resources to vote. This was before advanced in-person voting or [voting was offered] by mail and when we had many other unfair, iniquitous, undemocratic policies. It wasn’t for a partisan advantage so much as an ideological and cultural one,” Ellett said......

“The creativity of White, Southern politicians, for over 100 years, in figuring out ways to, first, keep Black people from voting and then trying to make it as difficult and burdensome as they can without it appearing racist, and a violation of the Constitution, is breathtaking,” said Steven Lawson, a professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University, who served as an expert witness in a Justice Department suit challenging Georgia’s runoff system in 1990.