Alternate Slate: The House January 6^th Committee plans to show in its hearing today that President Trump was involved in a scheme to send unappointed “alternate” Republican electors to cast their votes for Trump in seven swing states won by Joe Biden.

  “We’ll show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme,” committee member Adam Schiff, a California Democrat,  said Sunday on CNN. “We’ll also, again, show evidence about what his own lawyers came to think about this scheme.”

  Rosalind Helderman reports for The Washington Post that, “internal campaign emails and memos revealthat the convening of the fake electors was apparently a much more concerted strategy, intended to give Vice President Mike Pence a reason to declare that the outcome of the election was somehow in doubt on Jan. 6, 2021, when he was to preside over the congressional counting of the electoral college votes.”

  Helderman writes that, “The documents show that Trump’s team pushed ahead and urged the electors to meet — then pressured Pence to cite the alternate Trump slates — even as various Trump lawyers acknowledged privately that they did not have legal validity and the gatherings had not been in compliance with state laws.”

Rino Hunting: Demonstrating the new extremes of his party, former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, who’s running for the Senate from his state, has issued a campaign advertisement in which he busts into a home armed with a shotgun and accompanied by a SWAT team carrying assault rifles to announce that he’s searching for “RINOs,” Republicans in name only.

  RINOs are Republicans who do not support Donald Trump, would consider gun control, or who have any doubts about banning abortion.

  The former Navy SEAL says in the ad, “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.” He advises, “Join the MAGA crew.”

  Greitens’ campaign chair is Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr.

  Some people out there take this stuff seriously. Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican on the January 6^th House investigating committee who voted to impeach Donald Trump, revealed that he received a letter threatening the execution of his family, including their 5-month-old baby.

Fatal Delay: Several police officers were inside the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas armed with rifles and at least three ballistic shields for an hour before they burst into a classroom and killed the mass shooter, according to  documents reviewed by the Austin American-Statesman. The paper cited documents as well as school surveillance and police body camera video from the May 23^rd massacre.

  Video showed the gunman entering the school at 11:33 am and 11 cops coming into the building three minutes later. They waited for an hour before breaching the classroom door.

  Angry citizens of Uvalde have called for the resignation of school police chief Pete Arredondo, who was also sworn in as a member of city council just days after the massacre.

The War Zone: Russia says two Americans captured while fighting for Ukraine are war criminals, not prisoners of war.

  The Kremlin’s chief spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov told NBC News that Alex Drueke, 39, and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, 27, were “soldiers of fortune” and should be “held responsible for the crimes they have committed.” 

  Drueke is a former US Army staff sergeant who served two tours in Iraq, and Huynh is a former Marine. On video released by the Russians, the two have said they’ve been beaten.

  Peskov said that because the men are not part of the Ukrainian army they are not entitled to Geneva Convention protections for combatants. Russia has already sentenced to death three fighters from Britain and Morocco.

  For a country committing war crimes every day, Russia is pretty aggrieved. The Russians yesterday threatened Lithuania, a member of NATO, with retaliation if the Baltic country does not reverse its ban on the movement of goods to Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad by rail. Peskov told reporters the situation is “more than serious.” 

  Accustomed to Russian threats, officials in Vilnius are blowing it off. “We are not particularly worried about Russian threats,” said Launa’s Kasciunas, chairman of the Lithuanian Parliament’s national security and defense committee. “The Kremlin has very few options for how to retaliate.”

Parliamentary Procedures. Israel’s governing coalition has collapsed, bringing on the country’s fifth election in three years. 

  In France, the alliance of President Emanuel Macron lost it majority in parliament by 44 seats. Macron remains president, but he’ll have a hard time putting through his agenda.

The Spin Rack:  —  The average national price for regular gasoline has dropped below $5, the first drop since April. President Biden says he may decide by the end of the week whether to relax the 18.4 cent per gallon federal gas tax. — Hong Kong’s iconic ornate  four-deck, 260-foot floating restaurant capsized and sank at sea. Closed because of the pandemic, it was being towed to another location for repair and cheaper dockage when it went down in 1,000 feet of water. — A New York taxi hit a cyclist yesterday then jumped the curb, pinning several people to the sidewalk. At least one woman lost a leg. By-passers tried to lift the cab off the victims.

Big Fish: A 13-foot, 661-pound stingray hooked in the Mekong River in Cambodia may be the largest freshwater fish ever caught. It was tagged and released. 

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