Here’s all the shit we couldn’t cover today:
- Okay! So! Omar Ashmawy, staff director and chief counsel of the Office of Congressional Ethics, is being accused in a lawsuit of verbally abusing women, physically assaulting women, and “threatening to use his position as staff director and chief counsel of the Office of Congressional Ethics to induce a criminal proceeding to be brought against Plaintiff and/or others.” His job is literally to investigate misconduct allegations in the House. Ashmawy denies these allegations. [Foreign Policy]
- Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, meanwhile, has drummed up significant Republican support for a proposal that would make any sexual harassment settlement public unless the victim prefers otherwise. [Politico]
- The possibility of a DACA fix before the end of the year is fading fast. [CNN]
- Omarosa has disputed that she was fired—although the Secret Service has confirmed that it deactivated her security pass—and said earlier today that she saw things in the administration that made her “uncomfortable.” She told ABC News that “It has been very, very challenging being the only African-American woman in the senior staff,” and that “it was very lonely.” [The Hill]
- Robin Roberts dismissed Omarosa’s media blitz with an iconic “Bye, Felicia,” to which Omarosa responded: “It’s a black woman civil war.” Okay... if true, it kind of seems like one side of this civil war is Omarosa and one side is everybody else, but what do I know? [The Daily Beast]
- “Current and former officials said that Trump’s intelligence update — known as the president’s daily brief, or PDB — is often structured to avoid upsetting him. ‘If you talk about Russia, meddling, interference — that takes the PDB off the rails, said a former senior U.S. intelligence official.” [The Washington Post]
- Merry Christmas to these two lovebirds! [Twitter]
Here are some tweets the president was allowed to publish:
This has been Barf Bag.