South-Carolina
House Republicans prepare to hold Attorney General Garland in contempt
The Republican-led House of Representatives is expected to vote Wednesday to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, escalating a tug-of-war over audiotapes of President Biden’s interview with a special prosecutor.
That federal criminal investigation ended this year with no charges against Biden for mishandling classified information, in part because special counsel Robert Hur concluded a jury would likely view the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
Read the special counsel’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents
Top Republican leaders worked Tuesday night to count votes to ensure the measure could pass in the narrowly divided chamber. If Republicans are successful, Garland will become the third attorney general to be reprimanded by the House for defying a congressional subpoena. But the consequences are likely to end there, since Biden has asserted executive privilege over the tapes, giving Garland legal protection from any further investigation.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told NPR that he expected the House to approve the contempt resolutions and said he hasn’t heard any reservations about them from fellow Republicans.
Democrats pointed out that Jordan, who is a chief advocate of holding Garland in contempt, declined to cooperate with the House January 6 committee’s investigation in 2022. He publicly admitted that he was discussing a plan to contest the electoral votes in several states with the Trump White House. Jordan told NPR that he never told the committee he wouldn’t appear and maintained he negotiated with it. “This is different — Merrick Garland says you ain’t getting it,” referring to the audiotapes, adding, “There’s no negotiating whatsoever.”
He and other House Republicans argued Tuesday that the Justice Department waived privilege over withholding the tapes once it gave the committees the transcripts of the interviews with Biden.
Democrats and the Justice Department reject the premise of the contempt proceedings
The attorney general has said he engaged in extraordinary accommodation with lawmakers. Special counsel Hur provided five hours of congressional testimony about his findings. And the Justice Department turned over written transcripts of Biden’s interview, as well as correspondence with lawyers for Biden and the White House.
Garland sought to cast the contempt proceedings as part of a series of attacks against the Justice Department and its career employees by partisans intent on making political points.
“Disagreements about politics are good for our democracy,” Garland wrote in an opinion piece this week. “They are normal. But using conspiracy theories, falsehoods, violence and threats of violence to affect political outcomes is not normal. The short-term political benefits of those tactics will never make up for the long-term cost to our country.”
Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, furthered that argument Tuesday in a hearing on the contempt measure.
“This isn’t really about a policy disagreement with the DOJ. This is about feeding the MAGA base after 18 months of investigation that have produced failure after failure,” Nadler said.
Nadler also maintained that the audiotapes of the president could be easily manipulated by House Republicans, pointing to a case of a witness who appeared before the panel last year that resulted in threats.
Asked whether Democrats will be unified against the contempt resolution, Rep Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat, told NPR that he expected the “overwhelming majority” of Democrats to vote no. He called the effort “frivolous, unconscionable, unnecessary and un-American.”
Republicans say Garland must provide more information
But leaders of the House Oversight and Judiciary committees said they had legitimate reasons to demand the tapes of Biden’s interview, reasoning that it could help advance a stalled impeachment probe against Biden and assess the need for new legislation to protect sensitive or classified materials.
The tapes also would help make their case that Biden, 81, is losing his faculties, a pillar of the Republican case against Biden in the 2024 presidential election.
“If the attorney general wants to defy Congress and not produce the audio recordings, he will face consequences for those actions,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., declared recently.
Biden’s decision to invoke executive privilege not only insulates his attorney general from a criminal contempt probe but also prevents the audio from appearing in campaign ads.
“Quite frankly, the White House has every reason to be concerned about the audio being released, because it could be chopped up and used in various ways in a political campaign in an election year to make the president look and sound bad,” George Mason University political scientist Mark Rozell told NPR.
Biden blocks the release of recordings of his classified documents interview
The Heritage Foundation and several media organizations are suing for access to those tapes under the Freedom of Information Act, but it’s not clear they will meet with success before the November election.
Copyright 2024 NPR
COLUMBIA, S.C. (WIS) – With the primary season concluded, South Carolina’s gubernatorial race is coming into focus, marking the first time in nearly a decade that Gov. Henry McMaster will not appear on the ballot.
Republican Attorney General Alan Wilson and Democratic state Rep. Jermaine Johnson have secured their parties’ nominations and will face off in November as they begin shifting their campaigns toward the general election.
Wilson, a Lexington native and combat veteran, has served as the state’s attorney general since 2011. He is campaigning on a platform focused on tax reform, government transparency, and affordability, including a proposal to eliminate the state income tax.
“I think it signals to us that our message of talking about the people of South Carolina and our message of hope … resonated with the voters,” Wilson said, referencing his primary victory.
Johnson, who has represented Richland County in the South Carolina House since 2021 and lives in Hopkins, is centering his campaign on what he calls a need for change and new leadership. He is seeking to become the state’s first Democratic governor since the late 1990s.
“People are just angry … because their lives just aren’t getting any better,” Johnson said. “If we elect the same type of leadership, we will get the same type of result.”
Johnson pointed to Republican primary results, including the defeat of the sitting lieutenant governor in the GOP runoff, as evidence that voters are open to change.
Wilson has selected state Sen. Mike Reichenbach of Florence County as his running mate, saying Reichenbach would spearhead an effort to audit state agencies if elected.
Johnson has not yet announced a lieutenant governor candidate but said he expects to do so within the next month.
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Copyright 2026 WIS. All rights reserved.
Did anyone want this? A slick remake of Star Fox 64, minus the “64.” The same rickety rail-shooter from nearly three decades ago, glossed up with gorgeous environments and uncanny photorealistic animals. A modern game peeks through the haze of this nostalgia. But it’s not altogether worth the $50 pricetag ($60 if you want a physical cartridge).
The Star Fox campaign begins with a cinematic dramatization of the original game’s opening text crawl — the scene of Fox McCloud’s father betrayed by an ally into the hands of the evil Dr. Andross. Three years later, Fox commands his dad’s mercenary band against Andross. Each successive mission briefing gets reworked from its original clipped dialogue into fully animated mini-movies.
James Mastromarino/Nintendo /
But the visuals are a mixed bag. Detailed as the planets and ships might be, fans objected to Fox’s unflattering appearance after the game’s trailer dropped. His original character designer, who wasn’t involved in the new game, admitted to preferring the Super Mario Galaxy Movie version of Fox to this remake’s. For my money, the lighting is more of a problem than the models. In nearly every scene, the cockpit illuminates Fox in a gross green glow.
This campaign doesn’t take long to complete — between an hour to two hours, depending on how often you die and reload. But to reach the game’s true ending, you’ll have to restart and hunt for secret paths, easily quadrupling the runtime. You can also play cooperatively on two systems if you’re in the same room, or you can split your Joy-Cons to have one player steer and the other use mouse controls to fire lasers (an example of Nintendo sacrificing ease for a new gimmick). I’d have loved this mode much more if you could have a second player aim with a joystick, as in Donkey Kong Bananza.
Battle Mode makes for a more entertaining multiplayer experience, but you can’t play it on the same system. I tried it through an online session Nintendo set up, diving and gunning my way through 4v4 matches that required us to capture points or collect energy from meteorites. If you’re hooked up to a webcam, you can use an augmented reality feature to puppet a character’s portrait in GameChat. The facetracking is pretty good: raise your eyebrows, and your character will raise their eyebrows back. Open your mouth to speak and they’ll do the same. If you’re playing as Slippy Toad and puff out your cheeks, you’ll see him inflate his chin.
But even with these charming flourishes, Star Fox remains awkward. It’s got the production values of a modern blockbuster, but the sensibility of a 1990s arcade game. The campaign feels particularly antiquated, even with its expanded script and cutscenes. Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected more. This story’s already been reheated three times since the 1990s, after all.
If you’ve got buddies to battle or a tolerance for odd co-op, go for it. Otherwise, you’re better off skipping this remake and saving up for an original game.
Copyright 2026 NPR
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