THE SHOW NOTES: Trump's Wild Card Pick, Why Kamala Didn't Go On Rogan, & Buying InfoWars

Welcome! Nine days after the election, California has only counted 87% of the vote.

🚨 NEW: FBI raids Polymarket CEO’s home, seizing phone, electronics - CNBC

🚨 UFO: Experts testify before lawmakers that the U.S. is running secret UAP programs - NPR

MOON: Friday’s supermoon is also a beaver moon? - USA Today

CLINCHED: Republicans win 218 US House seats, giving Donald Trump and the party control of government - AP

🚨 WHAT: Leaked emails reveal scale of Swedish minister’s bananaphobia - Politico

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The Wild Card Pick

In his most controversial cabinet pick to date, Donald Trump has tapped Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General setting up a monumentally complicated path to Senate confirmation.

Matt Gaetz was accused of sleeping with an underage girl sparking an ethics investigation by the House Ethics Committee. After yesterday’s nomination announcement, Gaetz resigned from Congress just two days before a “highly damaging” report from the committee was set to be released. As Melanie Zanona from Punchbowl News notes on X, “The panel no longer has jurisdiction when he leaves.”

Here’s what Republican Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin said about Gaetz earlier this year:

How Gaetz to AG happened according to Politico:

As of Monday, Gaetz was not on the short list to be Trump’s choice for attorney general. But Trump wasn’t satisfied with those options, our Meridith McGraw tells Playbook.

The view from Trump world: “None of the attorneys had what Trump wants, and they didn’t talk like Gaetz,” a Trump adviser tells The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo . “Everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit. Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.’”

The Gaetz-for-AG plan came together yesterday, just hours before it was announced, Meridith tells us. It was hatched aboard Trump’s airplane en route to Washington, on which Gaetz was a passenger. A Trump official revealed more details to Playbook late last night: BORIS EPSHTEYN played a central role in the development, lobbying Trump to choose Gaetz while incoming White House chief of staff SUSIE WILES was in a different, adjacent room on the plane, apparently unaware.

Read my full morning piece on Gaetz here.

Presented Without Comment

BREAKING: The Onion Bought InfoWars

The satirical news site known as The Onion bought Alex Jones' Infowars during a bankruptcy auction in partnership with Sandy Hook families and Everytown for Gun Safety. This is from NBC:

Details of Wednesday’s auction, including how much was offered for Free Speech Systems, the parent company of Infowars, and related assets, were not immediately known. Funds generated from the sale are meant to satisfy Jones’ estate creditors, comprised largely of victims’ families of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting to whom he must pay damages in defamation verdicts.

Sandy Hook families filed lawsuits in Connecticut and Texas claiming Jones defamed them on his show and inflicted emotional distress by repeatedly suggesting the shooting, in which a gunman killed 20 first-grade children and six adults, was a hoax.

Juries awarded the families nearly $1.5 billion in total in their lawsuits, but they have been unable to collect anything from Jones, who claimed he can’t afford that massive a sum. He filed for bankruptcy in late 2022, and a judge in June allowed him to liquidate his personal assets to help pay off the verdicts.

Why Kamala Didn’t Go On Rogan

Kamala Harris didn’t go on Joe Rogan’s podcast because she was worried about the blowback from her supporters.

The Harris campaign and Rogan, whose audience is bigger than that of many television networks, had discussed an interview for his podcast — a move some Democrats hoped would help Harris reach young men who were gravitating towards Trump.

The talks faltered because of concerns at how the interview would be perceived within the Democratic party, said Jennifer Palmieri, a senior adviser to Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff.

“There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash,” Palmieri said on Wednesday.

Full story at Financial Times (paywall) or NY Post (free).

Fetterman: Trump’s Picks are God-tier-level trolling to own the progressives

Tweets that caught my eye:

Trending news:

• Trump taps Gabbard for director of national intelligence - The Hill

• ‘I made a mistake’: House Foreign Affairs chief detained by airport police for appearing intoxicated - SEMAFOR

• Eva Longoria Reveals She Moved Her Family Out of “Dystopian” United States: “I’m Privileged” - Hollywood Reporter

• ERLC letter to Trump transition team encourages policy changes - Baptist Press

• South African government says it won’t help 4,000 illegal miners inside a closed mine - CNN

• Mark Zuckerberg just dropped a single with T-Pain - The Verge

• China’s president will unveil a megaport in Peru, but locals say they’re being left out - AP

• Advance Auto Parts is closing more than 700 locations - CNN

• Diabetics left without treatment as global rate of disease doubles - FT (paywall)

• Trump Whale Scores $85 Million Windfall on Election - WSJ (paywall)

Market snapshot: