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By Will Steakin, Adam Wren and Dasha Burns |
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With help from Eli Okun, Ali Bianco and Irie Sentner Good Tuesday morning. We’re ditching the boba and hunting down all the free joe we can find for National Coffee Day. Get in touch. In today’s Playbook … — Democratic insurgents prepare to bring their fight to the House. — AI execs prepare to make their pitches to Donald Trump and Mike Johnson. — The Boldfaces: Melat Kiros, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., James Boasberg, Kurt Olsen, Angela Paxton, Sean Parnell, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Drake, Lil Wayne and more.
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DRIVING THE DAY |
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A new class of left-wing lawmakers is preparing to infiltrate Washington next year — and they’re taking lessons from past insurgents on both sides of the aisle. Meet the Bloc. That’s what some have taken to calling the core group of incoming progressives who, in many cases, overthrew more moderate Democrats in safe blue districts: Melat Kiros, Adam Hamawy, Chris Rabb, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and Donavan McKinney. Many traveled from race to race during the primaries, helping the next one over the line. Now they’re holding socials and policy sessions around Washington to build a support structure ahead of January. “They’re moving as a bloc. It’d be harder for them to do individually,” a progressive operative close to the group told Playbook. That strategy is already taking shape. Playbook learned the Bloc will collectively endorse Mai Vang as its latest insurgent challenger against Democratic incumbent Rep. Doris Matsui in California’s 7th District, with travel being arranged for members to rally support. Vang is also expected to appear with socialist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker for a fundraising stream in early October, a person familiar told Playbook. They see the Squad as a cautionary tale, given the original group never developed an ecosystem in Washington and eventually fractured. “There was not an effective D.C. social life for them,” an operative said, warning that without a supportive political community, Washington can become “a pressure cooker of moderation.”
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A message from Anthropic: How a small lab is giving more patients next-day answers
A kidney disease diagnosis is hard enough without a long wait for answers. As case loads grow at Arkana Labs, they’re using Claude to help process referral paperwork with 97–98% accuracy, so patients still get results the day after a biopsy.
Learn more |
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But their biggest test will likely come immediately after swearing in: Hakeem Jeffries. If Democrats win a narrow House majority, the Bloc could hold meaningful leverage in a speaker vote … and an opportunity to extract concessions or simply not back Jeffries at all. Ideas floated among the group include greater procedural power, changes to DCCC primaries and committee slots, two people familiar tell Playbook. Emma Vigeland, co-host of “The Majority Report,” told Playbook that Jeffries is “quite literally surrounded in his district by DSA electeds.” “The base of the party is a lot closer to those electeds than he would like to think,” Vigeland said, adding that “there are two extremely popular Democrats in his backyard who both have the backing of DSA, who could use their enormous popularity to primary him next cycle.” Jeffries is paying attention, and has already spoken privately with Hamawy and Avila Chevalier, people familiar tell Playbook. Playbook called up the last firebrand to successfully squeeze concessions out of an incoming speaker: Matt Gaetz. His advice: Ask for both policy and personnel changes, expect members to defect and, most importantly, stay together — literally. “Whatever group you start with, you’re going to end with a smaller number,” Gaetz told Playbook. “Whenever my compatriots weren’t in my physical proximity, they were negotiating their exit deal.” The hardest part, Gaetz said, will be finding “somebody who is willing to take the heat,” recalling “hours and hours and hours” of colleagues screaming at him during the fight over former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s bid to lead. “If there is going to be an insurgency against Jeffries,” Gaetz said, “it will have to be led by somebody who is not going through the freshman experience at the same time.” Moderates are already warning Jeffries not to follow McCarthy’s playbook. One moderate Democrat told Playbook that, unlike Republicans who gave McCarthy room to negotiate with Gaetz and his allies, centrist Democrats aren’t planning to stand aside. “You don’t make the moderates the bad guys,” the Democrat said. “They have to be the bad guys. You make a deal with them and make us the bad guys — that’s a problem.” On today’s Playbook Podcast: Will and Dasha discuss why Jeffries will face some trouble trying to walk around the Bloc come January. Plus, Playbook’s Megan Messerly joins to preview President Donald Trump’s very red midterm campaign trail, and today’s MAHA Summit, which is roiling critics.
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A message from Anthropic:  
As case loads grow at Arkana Labs, they use Claude to help process paperwork with 97-98% accuracy. Learn more |
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THE DOWNLOAD |
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BRAVE NEW WORLD: Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson have a high-profile meeting at 12:30 p.m. with top AI industry execs. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also met with Senate Majority Leader John Thune last night, per POLITICO’s Owen Dahlkamp. Despite the freakout over Washington’s sluggishness to enact AI safety regulation, the mood around this week’s meetings is broadly positive. And in private, chipmakers Nvidia and AMD are pushing the administration to prevent Congress from putting China export restrictions in the National Defense Authorization Act, POLITICO’s Ari Hawkins reports.
- Today’s public action will also be very pro-AI: The White House’s main event is a daylong celebration of a new tool, America.gov, that uses AI to consolidate information about the federal government for Americans to access readily, Fox News’ Peter D’Abrosca scooped. The event will include Trump, VP JD Vance, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang and multiple Cabinet officials.
THE SENATE’S BUSY WEEK: The Senate could vote as soon as tomorrow on the Ratepayer Protection Act and the combo stock trading ban/voter ID legislation. That followed some big bipartisan breakthroughs: The college sports bill passed 77-22 (though its future in the House is uncertain), per POLITICO’s Kelsey Brugger and Calen Razor. And negotiators said they’ve clinched an agreement on the text of permitting reform, per POLITICO’s Nico Portuondo and Anthony Cruz. Not so copacetic: Jack Smith goes before the Judiciary Committee at 9 a.m. MAHA IN POWER: A big MAHA summit in D.C. today will feature Vance, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, Mike Tyson, Russell Brand, Zach Lahn and more — a chance for the movement to flex its accomplishments ahead of the midterms, POLITICO’s Carmen Paun previews. But some prominent MAHA advocates are slamming the event as having been captured by corporate interests. And behind the scenes, the White House has thrown up hurdles to Kennedy’s attempted crackdown on ultraprocessed foods, WSJ’s Liz Essley Whyte and colleagues report.
- In Michigan, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is making his own outreach to the MAHA coalition, announcing an agenda that addresses hazardous pesticides, drinking water standards and access to healthy food from local farmers.
JUDICIARY SQUARE: Judge James Boasberg’s clash with the Trump administration will be back in the headlines today when the full, 11-member bench of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hears arguments on whether to unshackle his long-stalled contempt investigation aimed at top DOJ and DHS officials, POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein write in. En banc sittings in the D.C. Circuit — where Dem appointees outnumber Republican ones 7-4 — are very rare, typically amounting to a few per year, or less. This one was ordered after a bitterly divided three-judge appeals panel ruled in April against Boasberg continuing his probe.
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The outsider Democrat making the case for 2028 Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu joins On The Road with Jonathan Martin at Mosca’s Restaurant for a conversation on Trump, Democrats’ future, 2028 speculation and what he says it will take to rebuild trust in American institutions.
Watch the episode now. |
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THE FRONT PAGE |
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POTUS ON THE ROAD: Trump’s upcoming red-state campaign travel reflects GOP worries that Democratic strength could surge into conservative territory — and the need to shore up his base there, even if it comes at the expense of battleground visits, POLITICO’s Alex Gangitano and colleagues report. There’s particular alarm inside the White House about the Alaska and Ohio Senate races. (Meanwhile, Thune and GOP Whip John Barrasso are preparing to hit the campaign trail in October, POLITICO’s Jordain Carney and Mia McCarthy report.) HILL HEADACHES CONTINUE: Another week of Republican senators sighing at Trump’s latest off-message maneuvers. Plenty of senators distanced themselves from the White House’s campaign-style ads, per POLITICO’s Jordain Carney — including opposition from Thune to their taxpayer funding. And appropriators are angry over his pocket rescissions, as some Republicans now get on board with plans to block such cancellations in the future, POLITICO’s Katherine Tully-McManus and Jennifer Scholtes report. AD IT UP: Democrat Rebecca Cooke and the DCCC are launching a six-figure ad buy hitting Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) over data centers. The spot accuses Van Orden of taking thousands from a major data center developer before backing $70 billion in tax breaks, while Wisconsin families face higher utility bills. “Looks like D.C. doesn’t just stand for Washington,” the ad says. “It stands for data centers, too.”
- In Ohio, Sherrod Brown is launching a new ad, part of a seven-figure ad buy, slamming GOP Sen. Jon Husted over comments he made about people living in poverty, who he said are “just not very experienced at navigating the real world.” Watch the ad
ANOTHER AI RAMIFICATION: Meta’s Muse is ushering the world into an era of AI personal assistants, with the potential to make it easier for people to shift bank deposits around to take advantage of better rates, POLITICO’s Victoria Guida and colleagues report. That might bolster more Americans’ savings — and undercut an important structure of the banking system. Lawmakers, regulators and banks are scrambling to keep up and understand the threat.
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A message from Anthropic:  
How a small pathology lab is giving more patients next-day answers |
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5 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW |
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1. WAR REPORT: Continued saber-rattling notwithstanding, the U.S. and Iran are both talking with mediators this week — “a sign that both sides are serious about diplomacy,” POLITICO’s Nahal Toosi writes. But Trump swatted down an Axios report that he’d be open to granting Iran sanctions relief if it made significant steps on nuclear concessions.
2. SCOTUS WATCH: The Supreme Court next week takes up its first big case of the term — over holding oil companies accountable for climate change — and Justice Samuel Alito now won’t be there. His recusal is an about-face from his prior refusal to bow out. Meanwhile, the high court’s docket got a little bigger, as the Trump administration sought an emergency intervention to be allowed to stop providing hormone therapy to transgender prison inmates.
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A message from Anthropic: How a small lab is giving more patients next-day answers
A kidney disease diagnosis is hard enough without a long wait for answers. As case loads grow at Arkana Labs, they’re using Claude to help process referral paperwork with 97–98% accuracy, so patients still get results the day after a biopsy.
Learn more |
| |
|
3. WEAPONIZATION WATCH: First came Joe DiGenova. Now prominent election denier Kurt Olsen, too, is out of the Justice Department’s “grand conspiracy” investigation along with at least six other prosecutors, the Daily Mail’s Breanne Deppisch scooped. Their departures add to the woes of DOJ’s most ambitious effort to find evidence that the justice system politicized prosecutions or investigations of Trump. 4. TRAIL MIX: The most notable bites of news from the campaign trail: The DCCC plunked another $11 million into ads across 35 districts, Semafor’s Nick Wu scooped. … Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton publicly called for Texas Republicans to back the whole GOP ticket, even less-than-ideal candidates (like, perhaps, her soon-to-be-ex-husband Ken). … CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski dug up even more extreme comments from another lightning rod on that list, Bo French, who’s repeatedly embraced the idea of public executions for political opponents. 5. APOCALYPSE NOW: “OpenAI Scraps Release of New AI Model Over Safety Concerns,” by WSJ’s Maxwell Zeff: It’s “one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression. … The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. … [But it] showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.”
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New: Decoded by POLITICO Decoded is a daily briefing on the people, policy battles and market shifts moving technology forward. It brings POLITICO’s global reporting together in one place so you can see what’s changing and what to watch next.
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TALK OF THE TOWN |
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FIRST IN PLAYBOOK — Multiple former Trump officials and Hill staffers are accusing Sean Parnell, a senior Pentagon official whom Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is pushing to be Army secretary, of inflating his role in passing a 2018 VA reform bill, POLITICO’s Daniel Lippman reports. His Pentagon bio says “he played a pivotal role in the passage of the Mission Act,” a bill intended to give veterans health care options that Trump signed in 2018. Five former Trump administration officials, a current and a former Capitol Hill staffer involved in passage of the bill said Parnell had no direct role, with one former official calling that suggestion “simply false.” Hegseth backed Parnell in a statement to POLITICO, saying he helped draft the bill’s language and met with members of Congress and veterans across the country to rally support. Parnell didn’t respond to requests for comment and a Pentagon spokesperson declined to disclose the lawmakers Parnell met with. BRAD OPTICS — Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is facing a deluge of criticism from conservatives over a new ad touting her “welfare-to-work requirement.” After the ad went up yesterday, Dasha’s phone was lighting up with messages from Republicans detailing their own livid DMs about the ad. Yet it’s not the policy people are attacking — critics are upset that the main character in the video is a young white man named Brad. “It’s villainizing white men, making it look like the GOP hates Gen Z,” one Republican operative said of the takeaway from their private group chats. Another told Playbook: “That ad signed Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ political death certificate, and I say that as a previous fan of hers.” Meanwhile the social media pile-on got so big, including people calling for a retraction and firing of her comms team, that Sanders responded on X, refusing to back down: “Some critics online don’t like my welfare work requirement ad. Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls. If you are able-bodied you should not collect welfare simply because you choose not to work. Period.” FIRST IN PLAYBOOK — Attorney Bradford Cohen, who has previously represented Drake and Lil Wayne, has joined the legal team for X Strategies, the firm owned by Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz, in its multimillion-dollar lawsuit against former partner Derek Utley, which POLITICO first reported on. The suit alleges Utley stole millions from the company’s bank accounts to fuel a gambling addiction — allegations Utley disputes. Holland & Knight remains X Strategies’ lead counsel. IN MEMORIAM — “Jodie Allen, Washington Post editor who made the arcane accessible, dies at 88,” by WaPo’s Paul Duggan: “Before going into journalism, she spent years analyzing public policy. She edited Outlook, The Post’s commentary section, and later joined Slate.” PLAYBOOK METRO SECTION — Part of Lafayette Square is finally opening back up to the public, after eight months of the administration’s closure and renovations, WaPo’s Dan Diamond reports. OUT AND ABOUT — The American Association for the Advancement of Science hosted its Golden Goose Award ceremony (i.e., “science prom”) last night at the Library of Congress. The awards honor especially impactful federally funded research as part of an advocacy effort to push Washington to keep funding scientific R&D. SPOTTED: Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), Brian Stone, Nicola Fox, Karen St. Germain, Rebecca Keiser and Sudip Parikh. TRANSITIONS — Luke Pettit is leaving his role as a top official at Treasury, where he helped steer the launch of Trump Accounts, per Axios’ Mike Allen. He’s heading to the private sector. … Chris Tampio is now VP for state affairs at Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America. He most recently worked at Heartland Dental. … David Leviss is rejoining O’Melveny as a partner in the health care practice and a member of the congressional investigations team. He most recently worked at the SEC. HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Salena Zito … Robbie Kaplan … Larry Burton of Sen. Dan Sullivan’s (R-Alaska) office … David Nather … former NASA Administrator Bill Nelson … POLITICO’s Ryan Hutchins, Mehak Bhatti and Holland Johnson … Jade-Snow Joachim … Marissa Martinez … Oma Seddiq … Riley Swinehart … Finn Partners’ Scott Widmeyer and Jessica Ross … Will Saletan … Ryann DuRant of Citigroup … Anton Vuljaj … Shawn Pasternak of S-3 Group … Brian Shankman … Kevin Pérez-Allen of Signal Group … Elvir Klempic … Aviva Rosenthal of the Smithsonian … Paul Bock of Thorn Run Partners … former Rep. Max Sandlin (D-Texas) … Lisa Osborne Ross … former Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) … Marisa Salemme of the Senate Finance Dems … CBS’ Tory Coughlan … Kelly Ward Burton … Melissa DeRosa … Precision’s Laura Gaffey … Congressional Research Service’s Gary B. Ellis Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. Send Playbookers tips to playbook@politico.com or text us on Signal here. Playbook couldn’t happen without our editors Giuseppe Macri, Garrett Ross and Kyler Alvord.
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