Please stop taking nudes in the halls of Congress

The so-called hallowed Halls of Congress play host to a plethora of indecent acts every day — but one staffer for Senator Ben Cardin is taking it to new levels.

The public Twitter account of the audacious young “twink” is comprised almost solely of him in flagrante delicto with his older “bear” partner. The images and videos are explicit — and conspicuously and deliberately contain the staffer’s face.

One pic in particular, shared privately with Cockburn, raised his eyebrow, as it was taken in what certainly appears to be a conference room in the Hart Senate Office Building, where his boss’s office is located.

In the photo, the strapping young gentleman is naked but for a jock strap, on on all fours, facing away from the camera.

A cartoon of the Capitol Dome tastefully covers the extremities of his rear end — best to be tasteful after all. Cockburn shares this information for the benefit of the Capitol cleaners — though the House may no longer be in session, the Senate side can be plenty messy in their own right…

Is Nikole Hannah-Jones the NYT standards editor?

The most talked about story of the week among Cockburn’s fellow hacks is, quelle surprise, about journalism: James Bennet’s 17,000-word reflection in the Economist on his time as the New York Times opinion editor and ouster over Senator Tom Cotton’s “send in the troops” response to the 2020 riots. One of Bennet’s most notorious former colleagues was particularly peeved: “That’s a lot of self-indulgent words because you thought you’d be editor one day,” tweeted 1619 Project author and New York Times mag reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones Thursday. “Don’t we all look back fondly on the time when newsrooms run almost exclusively by white men produced the epitome of objective news that truly represented the real people of America.”

The ever prolific Hannah-Jones is something of an expert in the “producing” of “objective news,” having managed to write one article for the NYT since 2020: a review of two children’s books in February. For Times subscribers, who are big fans of creative ways of expressing data, here’s a graph showing just how much NH-J has contributed to the paper in the last decade:

DeSantis-conned

An employee of a Ron DeSantis super PAC consultancy was canned recently, allegedly for embezzling funds from the company, a spy tells Cockburn. The ex-employee’s page was unceremoniously scrubbed from the firm’s website in recent weeks and later wiped from appearing in a Google search. Firm insiders suggested to Cockburn that the firm won’t pursue legal action against the Madoff-wannabe because that would entail opening up all of the books related to the PAC and its vendors. One of the ex-employee’s few remaining online profiles notes that they have a “passion for helping others.”

Koch employees wage war

Some staff members have left Americans for Prosperity Action for rival campaigns after the Koch-backed group endorsed Nikki Haley, NBC News and Semafor report. Cockburn can confirm that the foreign policy team at AFP was furious with leadership for backing Haley, who is decidedly more of a war hawk than the anti-interventionists over at the Koch network. Staffers demanded an explanation for AFP’s endorsement in what a spy referred to as an “internal revolt.” AFP was apparently undeterred by a potential staff exodus, continuing to spend millions on ad buys and grassroots organizing for Haley’s campaign.

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