The White House is considering income caps for eligibility for student loan relief that would exclude higher-earning Americans, as President Biden nears a decision on the matter, according to three people aware of administration discussions.

The administration is considering various ways to forgive some student loan debt through executive action. In recent weeks, senior Biden aides have examined limiting the relief to people who earned less than either $125,000 or $150,000 as individual filers the previous year, the people said. That plan would set the threshold at around $250,000 or $300,000 for couples who file their taxes jointly, the people said. No final decisions have been made, and the people familiar with the matter stressed that planning was fluid and subject to change.

The White House is also weighing exactly how much student debt to eliminate for each borrower. Biden indicated to reporters this week that the amount would be lower than $50,000 per person. Administration officials have also signaled that the White House will cut at least $10,000 per qualifying borrower, the people said, embracing a position Biden himself appeared to support in a private meeting with the congressional Hispanic Caucus. The administration has also discussed limiting forgiveness to undergraduate loans, excluding those who had taken out loans for professional degrees in fields such as law and medicine, the people said.

“There’s different proposals floating around the administration about how to structure this,” said one person involved in the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations. “Over the course of the past week especially, administration and congressional staff have focused the conversation on debt cancellation on how to best meet the president’s desire to ensure the most economically vulnerable people with student debt benefit from any action.”

Forgiveness of $10,000 wouldn’t even put a tiny dent in what I owe in student loans, but I’m on an income based payment plan, and my income is too low for me to have to pay anything. After 25 years, if I live that long, the debt will be forgiven. In the meantime the government is spending lots of money to get me to file paperwork every year to prove I can’t pay anything. But for anyone who can benefit from a $10,000 reduction, I wish you well. Meanwhile, the government has no problem subsidizing billionaires like Elon Musk who pay no taxes.

For more on this issue, here’s a long think piece on student loan debt by Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic: Who Really Benefits From Student-Loan Forgiveness?

Trump Crime Family News

The Washington Post: Trump grand jury ending in N.Y. with no charges against ex-president.

A six-month grand jury that was convened late last year to hear evidence against Donald Trump was set to expire this week, closing a chapter in a lengthy criminal investigation that appears to be fizzling out without charges against the former president, people familiar with matter said.

San Francisco (Matt McCarthy)

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who took office in January, inherited a probe launched by his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who was convinced that there was a case against Trump for crimes related to manipulating the value of property assets to secure tax advantages or better loan rates.

The grand jury was convened in November with a mandate to hear evidence against the former president. But the decision on whether to finish the presentation and ask the panel to vote on charges would ultimately fall on Bragg, who decided to pause the process, according to people with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss information that has not been declared publicly.

A key problem, some of those people said, was Bragg’s concern over whether former Trump fixer Michael Cohen should be used as a witness.

Bragg has said he will announce when the investigation is over, noting that even after the special grand jury disbanded, other grand juries hearing a broad range of criminal cases in New York would be available to take action in this one if needed.

Still, the expiration of the grand jury — and the departure in February of two senior prosecutors who said Bragg was stalling the inquiry — makes any potential indictment of Trump seem unlikely, legal observershave said. By the time Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne quit, the grand jury had been inactive for weeks, with jurors being told to stay home, a person with knowledge of the issue previously said.

Lawyers in the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), who is a partner in the probe, are skeptical that any criminal case will be brought, people familiar with the situation said. They also spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. A spokeswoman for James said the investigation continues.

Once again, Trump escapes accountability for his criminal behavior. Meanwhile, another grand jury begins deliberations in Georgia. CBS News: Special grand jury considering Trump election interference in Georgia convenes Monday.

Fulton County prosecutors will begin selecting participants Monday for a special grand jury to consider whether former president Donald Trump should be charged for his attempts to pressure Georgia officials to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost.

By Matt McCarthy

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis asked a panel of judges in January for the special grand jury because of “information indicating a reasonable probability” that the election “was subject to possible criminal disruptions.”

Willis has said in interviews that the investigation includes a January 2, 2021 phone call in which Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” Trump lost the state to Joe Biden by that margin — an outcome that was affirmed by several recounts. 

Special grand juries are unusual. They focus on just one investigation, and can be impaneled for far longer than typical grand juries, which often consider charging recommendations for a variety of investigations….

Willis wrote in the request that “a significant number of witnesses and prospective witnesses have refused to cooperate with the investigation absent a subpoena requiring their testimony.”

Willis said in an April 19 interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she will wait until after the state’s May 24 primaries to issue subpoenas to public officials — meaning the special grand jury may not hear witnesses until June.

January 6 Investigation News

Kyle Cheney at Politico: Eastman to produce 10,000 pages of Trump-related emails as broader legal fight looms.

Attorney John Eastman, a key architect of former President Donald Trump’s legal effort to overturn the 2020 election, is preparing to provide another 10,000 pages of records to the Jan. 6 select committee, his attorney revealed late Friday.

It’s the latest breakthrough for congressional investigators in their ongoing fight to obtain details of Trump’s last-ditch plans to overturn his election loss.

Eastman had claimed attorney-client privilege over 37,000 pages of post-election emails related to his work for Trump. But under pressure from U.S. District Court Judge David Carter — who ruled in March that Eastman and Trump likely entered into a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election — Eastman withdrew privilege claims for nearly a third of that total.

In Friday’s court filing, Eastman’s lawyers indicated that the select committee now wants more time to consider how to handle the remaining 27,000 pages of records that remain in dispute. Carter has asked Eastman to produce a log of all the emails that remain contested, but Eastman is now asking Carter for a brief reprieve while the select committee reviews the new documents and determines how to proceed.

The committee’s legal fight to obtain Eastman’s records — all originally housed by his former employer, Chapman University — has been a top priority for the panel, which is fending off dozens of lawsuits from witnesses to Trump’s conduct in the aftermath of the election.

The panel has used the Eastman lawsuit, as well as litigation against former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, to reveal broad swaths of the evidence it has obtained showing Trump ignored overwhelming legal advice that he had been defeated. Their evidence also shows that Trump sat by on Jan. 6, 2021 as a mob of his supporters ransacked the Capitol, waiting hours and continuing to press allies to block now-President Joe Biden’s victory even as he watched the violence unfold on TV.

By Matt McCarthy

Also by Kyle Cheney at Politico: Second Oath Keeper pleads to seditious conspiracy.

A second member of the Oath Keepers facing a seditious conspiracy charge for his role in the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol pleaded guilty Friday and is preparing to cooperate with prosecutors.

Brian Ulrich, one of 11 Oath Keepers facing the gravest charges to emerge from the Jan. 6 attack, pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of Congress’ electoral vote-counting session. He follows Joshua James, an Oath Keeper who provided personal security to Roger Stone, who pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy last month.

Cooperation from Ulrich of Georgia and James of Alabama — in addition to others who have previously reached cooperation deals with the government — could arm prosecutors with substantial evidence as they work to secure the convictions of the remaining defendants, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes III.

The indictment against the broader group suggests Ulrich discussed bringing firearms and ammunition to store at a hotel in Arlington, Va., where the group amassed a cache of weapons they called a “quick-reaction force” or QRF.

Ulrich was among a group of Oath Keepers who used golf carts to travel from a hotel to the Capitol, “at times swerving around law enforcement vehicles” while another defendant, Roberto Minuta, livestreamed, prosecutors say.

A bit more from The Daily Beast: Rioter Turns on Oath Keepers Boss at Tearful Plea Hearing.

A member of the Oath Keepers accused of sedition in the Jan. 6 riots pleaded guilty on Friday, agreeing to cooperate with the feds in their investigation. Brian Ulrich, 44, was reportedly tearful as he pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding, which could land him in prison for up to seven years. As part of the agreement, Ulrich said he would sit down with federal investigators and specifically fingered Oath Keepers boss Stewart Rhodes as having a role in the conspiracy to stop President Joe Biden’s certification. According to court documents, Ulrich messaged Oath Keeper leadership ahead of the riots: “Someone can tell me if I’m crazy but I’m planning on having a backpack for regular use and then a separate backpack with my ammo load out with some basics that I can [just] switch to is [sic] shit truly the fan blades. I will be the guy running around with the budget AR.”

Read more at WSAV.com: Guyton man pleads guilty to Jan. 6 charges, by Molly Curley.

NOTE: The artwork in today’s post is by Matt McCarthy, who uses Photoshop to create surrealistic cat art. You can find more of his work on Instagram, where he posts as Mr. Matt McCarthy.

In the motion, the committee outlines seven “discrete categories of information” about which it seeks to question Meadows and argues that his claims of executive privilege should not preclude his testifying about those matters.

Cats on the porch, by Igor Selivanov

Those categories of information include testimony and documents relating to communications with members of Congress; the plan to replace acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen with Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark; efforts by Trump to “direct, persuade or pressure then Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally refuse to count electoral votes on January 6th”; and activity in the White House “immediately before and during the events of January 6th.”

The committee laid out new examples of warnings Meadows received before Jan. 6, 2021, along with a deepened understanding of his involvement with planning and coordinating efforts to disrupt the counting of electoral college votes in Congress.

Perhaps the most significant new piece of evidence presented by the committee is testimony from Hutchinson, who told investigators that her boss was informed “before the January 6th proceeding about the potential for violence that day,” according to the filing.

Axios: Lawmakers met with Meadows on election schemes, ex-aide testifies.

A former aide to ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows testified to the Jan. 6 Select Committee that Meadows met with several right-wing House members in December to discuss efforts to overturn the election, a new court filing reveals….

Driving the news: Cassidy Hutchinson, a former executive assistant to Meadows, testified that at least ten lawmakers – mostly members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus – met with Meadows on Dec. 21, 2020, according to the filing.

Tohukiro Kawai

She named Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Mo Brooks (R-Mo.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Jody Hice (R-Ga.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) and Scott Perry (R-Pa.), but said a “handful” of others were present or dialed in as well.

Some of the members professed belief in a legal theory that then-Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally reject electoral votes on Jan. 6, Hutchinson said.

There were multiple meetings of this kind with lawmakers during that period, Hutchinson testified. Some members, including Perry and Jordan, would “dial into meetings frequently.”

The White House Counsel’s Office also explicitly advised that another scheme planned by Trump allies was “not legally sound,” according to Hutchinson.

She testified that, in a December meeting that included Meadows, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s associates, the Counsel’s office raised concerns about a plan to have alternate electors cast votes for Trump.

Giuliani was reportedly a central figure in the Trump campaign’s coordination of the alternate electors.

Read the rest at Axios.

Politico: Jan. 6 panel gets inconsistent testimony on key Trump family conversation.

The Jan. 6 committee has received apparently inconsistent testimony from key witnesses on a notable point: just how much effort it took Ivanka Trump to persuade her father to criticize the attack.

Garden Patrol by Anne Mortimer

Three months ago, the panel sent a letter to Ivanka Trump asking her to voluntarily cooperate with its investigators. Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said investigators wanted to ask her about former President Donald Trump’s behavior as the attack unfolded. The letter homed in on White House staffers’ efforts to get Trump to speak out against the unfolding violence.

That letter leaned heavily on testimony from now-retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who was formerVice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser on the day of the attack. Kellogg “explained that White House staff wanted the President to take some immediate action to quell the unrest,” the letter to Ivanka Trump said, adding that Kellogg thought she could help get Trump to make a statement aimed at stopping the violence“The testimony also suggests that you agreed to talk to the President, but had to make multiple efforts to persuade President Trump to act,” the letter continues. Then it quotes from the transcript of Kellogg’s interview.

“And so presumably the first time she [Ivanka Trump] went in, it wasn’t sufficient or she wouldn’t have had to go back at least one more time, I assume. Is that correct?” the transcript reads, quoting the investigator who was interviewing Kellogg.

“Well, yes, ma’am,” Kellogg replies. “I think she went back there because Ivanka can be pretty tenacious.”

But multiple witnesses have described that specific episode differently to the panel, according to two people familiar with the testimony to the select committee. Those other witnesses, including the former president’s daughter herself, have testified that Trump sent out a tweet supporting Capitol Police just a few minutes after she first went in and asked him to say something about the attack, the people said.

A few more interesting stories:

CNN: Takeaways from Friday’s January 6-focused hearing on the bid to disqualify Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The New York Times: McCarthy’s Lie Puts G.O.P. Hypocrisy on Trump on Display.

The Washington Post: Opinion: McCarthy audio shows Congress must bolster our democratic system — now.

A bevy of Republican officials and figures in Donald Trump’s extended sphere of supplication reached out to the White House to try to persuade the president to take a firm stance against the violence. Most didn’t reach Trump directly, but even those who did clearly didn’t have much of an effect. In one widely reported example, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) implored Trump to demand that the rioters stand down, prompting Trump reportedly to reply, “I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

McCarthy, at direct risk from the violence, was understandably infuriated. New reporting from the New York Times reveals just how angry he was — and how, for one final time in Trump’s presidency, frustration with Trump was dampened by enthusiasm from the president’s base.

From the first weeks after Trump declared his candidacy in 2015, the Republican establishment went through a repeating pattern. Frustration at Trump’s comments or behavior, an assumption that it would damage him politically, perhaps even irreparably — only to learn that Republican voters didn’t care and sided with Trump….

Jeanne reading, Camille Pissarro, 1899

The best way to track the evolution is by walking through what was said publicly and privately, a day at a time — and comparing it with what public polling showed about the views of the Republican voting base.

In the weeks before Jan. 6, support for Trump was already softening among Republican voters. YouGov, conducting weekly polling for the Economist, measured Trump’s favorability (a metric evaluating Trump personally, not his presidency) as slipping slightly. In the weeks before the election, three-quarters of Republicans viewed him very favorably, a figure that dropped to two-thirds immediately before the riot. We’d seen this before; when Republicans lost the House in 2018, Trump — the guy who pledged that the GOP would get tired of winning — saw his approval ratings slip. Perhaps the same effect was at play here, or perhaps Trump’s refusal to submit to reality was beginning to fatigue his supporters. It’s hard to know.

Then Jan. 6 happened, and Trump took a hit among Republicans. But that was it.

Read more of Bump’s analysis at the WaPo.

At Politico, Kyle Cheney and Betsy Woodruff Swan write about the January 6 committee’s investigation in Trump’s last ditch efforts to put pressure on Mike Pence to overturn the election: Jan. 6 panel piecing together details of final Trump-Pence call.

Congressional investigators entering the last stage of their probe are gathering new evidence about a crucial moment on the Jan. 6 timeline: the final, fateful phone call between Donald Trump and Mike Pence before a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol.

They’ve had a lot of success on that front — court records and Jan. 6 select committee documents reveal that the panel has obtained significant details about that call. In recent weeks, they’ve learned even more from several high-profile witnesses who were in the Oval Office while Trump berated Pence for refusing to overturn the election.

Yet one crucial gap remains. Top Pence aides say the former vice president was in his residence when the call came in. He then left the room and was out of earshot for 15 to 20 minutes. Those aides told the select committee that Pence never disclosed to them the contents of the conversation. More importantly, Pence’s aides say he never revealed how he replied to Trump’s intense last-minute pressure.

Seated Closer to the Light, Black Girl Reading, by Irina-Sztukowski

That gap of information looms as the House panel works to finalize a minute-by-minute account of Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, when he pushed Pence to prevent the transfer of power to Biden. Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) has remained publicly undecided about whether to seek testimony from Pence himself, noting that Pence’s closest advisers have cooperated fulsomely. But investigators must also confront whether Pence’s side of that conversation — for which no Pence advisers were present — is significant enough to ask him to fill in the blanks.

It’s unlikely the committee will attempt to force Pence to testify. There are imposing legal obstacles for subpoenaing a former vice president, and the panel considers Pence a witness, not a target of their probe. Whether they ask for his voluntary help is another question.

An hour after the call, Pence would publicly declare what he’d privately told Trump for weeks: He would not assert unprecedented power to overturn the election.

Mike Lee is finally talking about his efforts to help Trump prove the existence of election fraud in the 2020 election following the failure of his efforts to overturn Biden’s victory on January 6. Deseret News: ‘I was not there to do his bidding’: Sen. Mike Lee breaks his silence about White House text messages.

Sen. Mike Lee says the text messages he sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows after the 2020 election don’t signal advocacy for overturning the results in favor of Donald Trump.

In his first interview since CNN last week revealed dozens of his texts to Meadows, the Utah Republican told the Deseret News on Wednesday his only goal was to figure out Congress’ role in a presidential election and sort through theories the Trump campaign pursued to challenge the outcome.

Lee said he has known Meadows for a long time and characterized his texts from Nov. 7, 2020, to Jan. 4, 2021, as having a level of informality that would be reserved for a friend.

“He knows that when I said things like ‘Tell me what we ought to be saying,’ what I was just trying to figure out was ‘What is your message?’ He knows me well enough to know that that doesn’t mean I will do your bidding, whatever it is,” Lee said in a 45-minute phone interview.

“Conversations I had with him at the time on the phone and in person, he knew that. He knew I was not there to do his bidding,” Lee said of his conversations with Meadows.

Lee said his texts to Meadows are being used out of context for “political motives” and were “leaked” during an important period of time in his reelection campaign. The messages were obtained by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and reviewed by CNN.

Sounds like ass covering to me.

Woman Reading on the Bench, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

One more from The Guardian: January 6 ‘was a coup organized by the president’, says Jamie Raskin. Raskin suggests that public hearings are coming soon.

Donald Trump attempted a coup on 6 January 2021 as he tried to salvage his doomed presidency, and that will be a central focus of forthcoming public hearings of the special House panel investigating events surrounding the insurrection at the US Capitol, the congressman Jamie Raskin has said.

Raskin is a prominent Democrat on the committee and also led the House efforts when Trump was impeached for a historic second time, in 2021, accused of inciting the storming of the US Capitol by his extremist supporters who were trying to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

“This was a coup organized by the president against the vice-president and against the Congress in order to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Raskin said in an interview with the Guardian, Reuters news agency and the Climate One radio program.

Public hearings by the bipartisan special committee investigating January 6 and related actions by Trump and his White House team and other allies, chaired by the Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, are expected next month.

“We’re going to tell the whole story of everything that happened. There was a violent insurrection and an attempted coup and we were saved by Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with that plan,” said Raskin.

So big things are happening in the committee and DOJ. Now if Congressional Democrats would start speaking out and calling out their GOP colleagues, we might have a chance to save democracy in 2022 and 2024,

What else is happening? What stories have caught your interest today?