When prosecutors charged Derrick Evans for Jan. 6 crimes, they didn’t struggle to make their case against the defendant — because Evans had already created overwhelming evidence to be used against him......

When his case went to trial, Evans pleaded guilty to a felony count of obstructing or impeding officers during a civil disorder and was sentenced to three months in prison. After serving time behind bars, he chose a nontraditional career path: Evans launched a Republican congressional campaign.

He did not, however, fare especially well. NBC News reported overnight:

Derrick Evans, a Jan. 6 rioter who admitted in court that he committed a felony crime against police officers when he stormed the Capitol while yelling “Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!” lost a Republican primary race against Rep. Carol Miller in West Virginia, NBC News projects.

It was not an especially close contest: With nearly all of the votes tallied, the incumbent congresswoman appears to have prevailed by more than 25 points......

To be sure, there are some related exceptions. Wisconsin’s Derrick Van Orden, a Trump loyalist who rallied outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, was elected as a Republican congressman in 2022. What’s more, there are some other Jan. 6 candidates on the ballot this year, and they might yet prevail.

But broadly speaking, those who’ve tried to parlay their Jan. 6 experiences into successful campaigns have failed. GOP primary voters in West Virginia's 1st Congressional District extended that losing streak yesterday.

With this in mind, Trump sat down with Time magazine’s Eric Cortellessa on April 12, and as part of the interview, the reporter asked, “Do you think women should be able to get the abortion pill mifepristone?” The presumptive GOP nominee acted as if his position was a secret.

“Well, I have an opinion on that, but I’m not going to explain,” Trump said. “I’m not gonna say it yet. But I have pretty strong views on that.”

At this point, Cortellessa reminded the former president that his allies “have called for enforcement of the Comstock Act, which prohibits the mailing of drugs used for abortions by mail.” He concluded, “Would your Department of Justice enforce it?” Trump, predictably, then turned to his go-to move:

“I will be making a statement on that over the next 14 days. ... Yeah, I have a big statement on that. I feel very strongly about it. I actually think it’s a very important issue.”

Fifteen days later, the Time magazine reporter had a follow-up conversation with the Republican, reminding him of his earlier commitment. “Last time we spoke, you said you had an announcement coming over the next two weeks regarding your policy on the abortion pill mifepristone,” Cortellessa said on April 27. “You haven’t made an announcement yet. Would you like to do so now?”

Trump replied, “No, I haven’t. I’ll be doing it over the next week or two.”.....

The whole point of the deceptive two-week trick is to push off inconvenient questions indefinitely. If Trump were pressed today for an answer to the same question, he’d likely say once more that he’ll have something for us “over the next week or two” — until a couple of weeks go by, at which point he’d peddle the same line, starting the cycle anew.

That said, if Trump wins the election, Americans will get an answer to the underlying question — shortly after he returns to the White House and starts implementing a regressive agenda.

More than a year after launching the probe, Loudermilk and his GOP colleagues on the House Administration Committee’s panel on oversight released a report on their findings, which was largely meaningless and broke no new ground. The document appeared designed to undermine the actual bipartisan Jan. 6 committee, but it failed.

For many reality-based observers, there were hopes that the Republicans’ underwhelming report marked the end of the pointless endeavor, but as NBC News reported, Loudermilk’s efforts are apparently still underway — and remain focused on a specific witness.

A GOP-controlled House committee investigating the special committee that probed the Jan. 6 attack and Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election sent a letter Wednesday to that panel’s star witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, asking her to hand over numerous communications with key Jan. 6 figures, as well as those related to her book deal.

Evidently, Loudermilk would like Hutchinson to turn over all communications — through this month — with a variety of key figures, including former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, who served as the vice chair of the actual Jan. 6 committee. The NBC News report added that the Georgia congressman also asked Hutchinson “for communications related to ‘potential publishing or book deals or related compensation,’ as well as on employment after the White House; the 25th Amendment, which covers removing a president from power; and her itinerary for a trip to the Florida’s Gulf Coast in early 2021.”....

The GOP’s report from March apparently tried to undermine public confidence in Hutchinson’s Jan. 6 testimony, insisting that she “substantially revised her story” and “significantly changed” her testimony over time. That was a lot less interesting than House Republicans seemed to realize: We already knew that Hutchinson was more forthcoming with investigators after she changed lawyers and was no longer represented by counsel who was being paid by Team Trump.

And yet the scrutiny is apparently ongoing.

Time will tell, of course, what becomes of this, but I continue to believe they’re taking an unnecessary political risk: The more Loudermilk and his team bring Hutchinson’s experiences back into the spotlight, the greater the dangers for Republicans.

After months in which Donald Trump practically begged President Joe Biden to debate him, the Democratic incumbent opened the door a few weeks ago. “I am, somewhere, I don’t know when, but I am happy to debate him,” Biden told radio host Howard Stern.

Evidently, he meant it. My MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim noted this morning:

President Joe Biden and presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump will face off on June 27, after a public back-and-forth on Wednesday morning that culminated in both candidates agreeing to a CNN invitation for a debate. The debate will be held at 9 p.m. ET at the network’s studios in Atlanta. CNN said there will be no audience at the debate, fulfilling a key demand from Biden’s camp.

.....Biden got the ball rolling on this in a rather pointed social media message published online this morning.
https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1790713878248038478

Four years ago, Trump — whom no one has ever accused of being a tactical mastermind — got all of this backwards, telling the public that he would “DESTROY” Biden in the debates. In fact, the GOP incumbent spent months telling the public that Biden was an addled old man, hiding in his basement, unable to speak in complete sentences.

The results were predictable: National polling found that a plurality of Americans expected Trump to win his 2020 debates against Biden. The Republican set out to convince the public that he would bulldoze his Democratic challenger, and many voters believed him.

But the plan backfired: When Biden and Trump actually met for their debates, post-event polling found that most Americans thought Biden won, thanks in part to the low expectations he was easily able to clear.

Four years later, Trump, apparently a slow learner, is making the identical mistake. The more he tells the public that Biden “can’t put two sentences together,” the easier the task for the Democratic incumbent. If Biden is lucky, the former president will stick to his current strategy, indifferent to the fact that he’s inadvertently helping the opponent he’s trying to hurt.

As Mother’s Day approached, a group of Republican senators, led by Alabama’s Katie Britt, tried to rally some support for a new legislative proposal called the “More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed Act” (or “MOMS Act”). As Axios reported late last week, the bill seemed rather predictable.

The bill would require states to apply child support obligations during pregnancy and would launch a website — Pregnancy.gov— with resources related to pregnancy, including information about adoption agencies, but not abortion clinics. It would also provide grants to anti-abortion non-profits that assist women through their pregnancies and after birth.

This is, to be sure, standard GOP fare. Republican officials tend to be uncomfortable with the idea that the party’s sole focus in this area is imposing abortion restrictions, and the MOMS Act appears designed to package familiar GOP measures on the issue.......

The Democratic senators added, “Americans don’t want the government to track, intimidate, and coerce pregnant women into carrying their pregnancies to term no matter their circumstances. Yet, Senate Republicans want to mandate the creation of an online federal database where women will be encouraged to register their pregnancies with the government in order to push them toward anti-abortion propaganda and dangerous crisis pregnancy centers — this tells us exactly how Republicans will weaponize the whole of government to restrict a woman’s freedom to choose and force them to stay pregnant no matter what.”

All of this comes on the heels of Donald Trump’s interview with Time magazine, in which reporter Eric Cortellessa asked, “Do you think states should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban?” The presumptive GOP nominee responded, “I think they might do that.”

Britt’s bill has 12 Republican co-sponsors. I don’t imagine we’ve heard the last of the debate over its provisions.