Principals

1. Senate may confirm Patel
2. GOP huddles on policy today
3. House Democrats eye shuffles
4. Biden pardon divides Democrats
5. Chip controls
6. US jobs market

PDB: Biden sends more arms to Ukraine

Biden in Africa … Lebanon truce looks fragile … NYT: How Biden changed his mind on pardoning his son

GOP open to Trump’s FBI gambit

Donald Trump’s plan to oust Christopher Wray as FBI director and install Kash Patel is getting an early green (or maybe yellow) light in the Senate GOP, Semafor’s Burgess Everett reports. Senators say they understand that Trump needs an FBI director he is comfortable with, and that while they don’t know Patel that well they are willing to give him a shot. It’s not lost on them, of course, that Wray was Trump’s own handpicked replacement for former FBI Director James Comey: “He was the Trump nominee the last time around,” Senate GOP Whip John Thune said of Wray. Patel certainly is no lay-up confirmation and will have his work cut out for him. But Republicans also think some deference to Trump is warranted in this situation. “The president’s allowed to have his appointees,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito.

GOP senators plot 2025 moves

Senate Republicans will spend a full five hours today plotting out their policy agenda at the Library of Congress, a retreat led by incoming Republican Policy Chair Shelley Moore Capito. They’ve got a lot to sync up on. A couple of clear goals include strategizing on how to approve regular spending bills and using budget reconciliation to pass key party priorities like tax cuts without Democratic votes. Getting through as many as two reconciliation bills will require Republicans in both chambers to pass budget resolutions and then identical bills while evading procedural hurdles. Sen. John Kennedy said Republicans should pack in as much as they can. “Everything. We may put Daylight Savings Time,” he told Semafor. “The mistake we made last time was not putting it as much as we could in.”

— Burgess Everett

How House Democratic committee leaders could shift

Out with the old and in with the … new-ish? House Democrats are eyeing a replacement of top committee members going into the next Congress, where they’ll play defense against a Republican trifecta. Rep. Jamie Raskin announced his bid to lead the Judiciary Committee, effectively putting Rep. Jerry Nadler, the longtime shot-caller, on notice. Committee members are ready for Raskin to take over, one lawmaker and an aide familiar with members’ thinking told Semafor. Meanwhile, Rep. Raúl Grijalva, acceded to growing concerns about his health and announced he wouldn’t seek the ranking position on the Natural Resources Committee next year, paving the way for Rep. Jared Huffman to succeed him. There’s still an open question about Rep. David Scott and whether he’ll relent to criticism about his health and give up the Agriculture Committee’s top seat.

— Kadia Goba

Democrats wrestle with Biden pardon

Democrats were of two minds about the president pardoning his son on Sunday – many condemning the decision, some happy that he’d pulled the trigger. The critics hailed from deep blue states (“Unwise,” said Vermont Sen. Peter Welch) and Trump-won swing seats (“No family should be above the law,” said Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez), fretting that Biden’s decision would make Americans even more cynical about politics. The supporters ranged from DNC chair Jaime Harrison to Watergate whistleblower John Dean, who told Semafor that Biden would be justified in going even further and issuing pre-emptive blanket pardons for the people Trump or his nominees talked about prosecuting. Still, multiple Democrats argued that the news may well be forgotten by the end of the week.

— David Weigel

Rep. Van Duyne, R-Texas, will sit down with Semafor’s Senior Washington Editor Elana Schor to share personal insights on the powerful Ways & Means committee, discussing the GOP’s plans for taxes, tariffs, and the future of the Republican party.

RSVP to the last Principals Live of the year.

Chip controls spare US allies (for now)

Stocks of US semiconductor firms rose on the news of the Biden administration’s new curbs on the sale of chipmaking tools to China. The Commerce Department announced rules further limiting the export of semiconductor making equipment and high-bandwidth memory chips from US and foreign companies. The controls, which included exemptions for Japan and the Netherlands, hit 140 companies but were narrower than earlier proposals. Geoffrey Gertz, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said that by including the exemptions, the Biden administration created space for allies to impose their own controls. “The threat of that exemption going away will hang over future discussions with the US government,” he said, noting that the incoming Trump administration may consider doing away with them. The new restrictions inspired blowback from the Chinese government, which vowed to retaliate.

— Morgan Chalfant

US employees increasingly search for jobs

Ahead of the release of data that will shed light on the US labor market, Gallup says that the percentage of US employees looking out for a new job reached its highest level in nearly a decade. Only 18% of employees polled this year said they are extremely satisfied in their current jobs, while 51% said they are either looking out for or “actively seeking” a different position. Several factors appear to be driving this shift post-pandemic, according to Gallup’s research, including the uptick in remote work and shifting employee expectations. Nearly three-quarters of employees surveyed also said their organization faced some kind of disruptive change in the last year. The federal government will publish the October Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey later today, and will release the November jobs report on Friday.

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: Democrats running to oust older committee leaders are doing so with “a tacit nod from the House Democratic leadership.”

Playbook: Pete Hegseth faces a rocky road ahead as Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon amid reports of alleged sexual misconduct and alcohol abuse. He is making his case to senators in person this week, focusing on members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

WaPo: Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin won’t face any challenges during leadership elections today, despite frustrations among some Democrats that he is impeding the rise of younger senators. “There’s a lot of work for Democrats to do, but it doesn’t center around changing leadership,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said.

Axios: This year’s White House holiday display boasts 83 Christmas trees, 9,810 feet of ribbon, more than 28,125 ornaments, and 165,075 lights.

Blindspot

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, curated with help from our partners at Ground News.

What the Left isn’t reading: The special House committee investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic sided with the theory that the virus likely leaked from a lab in China.

What the Right isn’t reading: Donald Trump’s press secretary pick Karoline Leavitt removed a social media post that praised then-Vice President Mike Pence for his actions on Jan. 6 before running for office in the 2022 midterms, CNN reported.

White House

• President Biden is meeting with Angola’s President João Lourenço today while in the country. He’ll also give a speech at the National Museum of Slavery.
• Biden vowed to press forward with hostage release efforts after the Israeli military said that Omer Neutra, an American Israeli citizen believed to have been taken alive by Hamas, had died on Oct 7.

Congress

• Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will tap Sen. Cory Booker, D-NJ., for a new No. 4 Democratic leadership position that will allow the party to avoid a fight between Booker and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., for the No. 3 spot. — Axios
• A Democratic congressional staffer was arrested for bringing ammunition into a House building.

Transition

• Donald Trump called for all hostages in the Middle East to be released before his inauguration and threatened that there will be “all hell to pay” if they are not.
• Trump said he would nominate investment banker Warren Stephens to be his US ambassador to the UK.
• Trump will attend the re-opening of Notre Dame in Paris on Saturday.
• Trump reiterated his opposition to Nippon Steel’s proposed $15 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel.

Economy

• Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said the central bank’s efforts to tame inflation “may be stalling.”

Business

• Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger resigned from the company after a rocky tenure.
• Jeff Bezos is helping to finance the AI chip startup Tenstorrent.

Courts

• Elon Musk lost his effort to have his 2018 $56 billion pay package reinstated.

National Security

• A pair of Senate Democrats asked Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to take steps to limit the president from deploying US military troops domestically, in advance of the Trump administration. — NBC
• The Senate confirmed the stalled promotion of Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, who was the commander during the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, to four-star general

Foreign Policy

• The Biden administration plans to send Ukraine $725 million in military aid consisting of counter-drone systems and munitions for HIMARS systems. The package is part of a late push to surge arms to Ukraine before Donald Trump takes office.
• Former Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote that Tehran is open to diplomatic talks with the US. — Foreign Affairs

Big Read

• The US-China prisoner exchange that took place last week also quietly freed three Uyghurs, including one woman whose son is a prominent Uyghur rights advocate in the US. — NYT

Principals Team

• Editors: Benjy Sarlin, Elana Schor, Morgan Chalfant
• Reporters: Burgess Everett, Kadia Goba, Shelby Talcott, David Weigel

Dan Sullivan is a Republican senator from Alaska. He’ll take part in the US Capitol Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony later today.

An Apple employee is suing the company for allegedly spying on its workers through their personal devices and iCloud accounts, Semafor’s Reed Albergotti scooped. The lawsuit is interesting, Albergotti wrote, because it “puts Apple’s vast universe of personal data under the spotlight at a time when it is pitching itself as the privacy-focused alternative in the age of artificial intelligence.”