Principals

1. Tim Scott’s endorsement dilemma
2. Border talks look stuck
3. DOJ vs. Hamas
4. U.S. weighs Yemen strike
5. Senate sex tape
6. The capitol’s risqué history

PDB: The consultants who connect politicians with social media influencers

Austin, Brown to Israel … Poll: 53% of voters say Biden’s policies hurt them personally … DOT fines Southwest $140 million for 2022 travel disaster

— edited by Benjy Sarlin, Jordan Weissmann and Morgan Chalfant

Nikki Haley and Donald Trump asked Tim Scott to endorse them

Nikki Haley called Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. to ask for his endorsement on Friday, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott scoops. The news comes as Haley is coming off her best poll yet, a CBS News survey showing her in second place in New Hampshire with 29% support and room to grow against Donald Trump’s 44% if Chris Christie were to drop out (which he doesn’t seem inclined to do). Scott’s support, along with her recent endorsement from Gov. Chris Sununu, would help advance the impression that she’s the last train out of town for voters hoping for a competitive race against Trump. But Haley’s not the only one courting Scott: Trump has also asked for his endorsement and stayed friendly with the senator throughout the race. If Scott were to announce his support, it would immediately vault him to the top tier of veepstakes speculation. That leaves Scott with a big decision on his hands — and doing nothing will be noted as well.

Still no deal yet in border talks

The Senate’s chances of reaching a bipartisan deal on Ukraine aid and the border by Christmas seemed to dim over the weekend, even as negotiators continued to huddle through Sunday. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., the lead Republican in the talks, said he thought the group needed “to have some kind of framework” by the end of the weekend. But one never materialized. Instead, Lankford and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued an update to GOP senators telling them “progress” was being made, though there were still “significant issues still under discussion and a lot of very technical work on drafting.” (Punchbowl reports that Lankford called colleagues to say that the outstanding disagreements probably won’t be worked out until January.) Meanwhile, conservative complaints about the process grew louder; 15 GOP lawmakers circulated a letter criticizing the “rushed and secret” talks, while calling for discussions to restart next month. “We feel that we’re being jammed. We’re not anywhere close to a deal,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” adding that he believed negotiations would spill into next year. “All sides should continue talking to get a deal in January,” a senior GOP Senate aide told Semafor. Democrats are dealing with their own internal drama: Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus vented their frustrations with the potential bill in a Zoom call with White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and Homeland Security Security Alejandro Mayorkas on Saturday, per a person briefed on the call (NBC News first reported the virtual meeting).

— Joseph Zeballos-Roig

Southern District targets Hamas finances

Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York are racing to build a case against Hamas, which will likely focus on the group’s financial network, according to two people familiar with the case but not directly involved in it. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams has assigned dozens of lawyers and FBI agents to the project, the latest in a long line of global forays from the high-powered Manhattan prosecutor’s office, part of a broader Biden administration effort to press the Palestinian group on all fronts after its Oct. 7 attack on Israel. And they may have rich pickings. The New York Times reported Saturday that the Israeli government had obtained in 2018 details of a kind of “private equity fund” that Hamas used to finance its activities — but chose not to pursue it. Frustrated Israeli analysts later posted the details of the investments, including skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates and a publicly traded Turkish real estate firm, to Facebook.

— Ben Smith

U.S. considers striking Yemen’s Houthis

The Pentagon is debating whether to directly strike Houthi rebel military targets in Yemen in response to the Iranian-backed militia’s escalating attacks on military and commercial ships in the Red Sea it claims are headed for Israeli ports, Semafor’s Jay Solomon reports. On Saturday, U.S. and British ships shot down 15 Houthi attack drones aimed at various vessels. Previously, the group struck a Norwegian-flagged tanker with a cruise missile, while last month they seized a cargo ship allegedly partly owned by an Israeli businessman and took its 25-person crew captive. Some sea traffic has already begun to divert away from the Red Sea in response. The U.S. has deployed two carrier strike groups to the Middle East since early October and has the assets to target Houthi missile batteries and radar systems inside Yemen. But so far it has stood down, out of fears of fueling a broader war against Iran and its proxies. There are additional reasons to fear a wider regional conflict igniting, too: As The Guardian reports, “the conviction has taken hold among Israeli politicians, generals and a widening slice of the public that a new war in Lebanon is inevitable.”

Senate sex tape rocks Capitol Hill

No, it wasn’t just you and your friends: Washington’s group chats were singularly devoted to one topic this weekend. That would be the extremely NSFW Daily Caller report that a Senate staffer allegedly filmed himself having sex with an unidentified man atop the dais in a room used for the confirmation hearing of a sitting Supreme Court Justice. The median reaction, texted to us from one staffer, was “WHAAAATTT?” (Other responses from around the Hill: “I cannot,” “I can’t,” and “I can’t believe no one sent it to me.”) The office of Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. announced over the weekend they had fired legislative aide Aidan Maese-Czeropski, whose name had circulated as an alleged participant on social media (he responded with a defiant non-denial on Linkedin). Capitol Police are also looking into the incident.

“Too many lack self-respect and respect for the institution they serve,” a disappointed Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb. told Semafor. (The House shouldn’t be too smug watching the scandal unfold, though: Three sources told Semafor they’d heard rumors of shenanigans in the members’ “cages” — office storage areas apparently favored by the more discreet.) All in all, it’s a fitting end to the year for the 118th Congress, where the once-shocking is increasingly routine.

— Kadia Goba

The time a congressman got caught in a Capitol office tryst

We asked Jamie Kirchick, the author of the brilliant 2022 book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington about historical echoes of the mess:

The Senate sodomy scandal brings to mind the saga of former Rep. Jon Hinson, Republican of Mississippi. Running for reelection in 1980, Hinson made a stunning confession: Four years earlier, working as an aide to Rep. Thad Cochran, he had been arrested for solicitation at the Iwo Jima Memorial, then a popular gay cruising spot. And if that wasn’t shocking enough, Hinson also admitted to having narrowly survived a fire at a gay pornographic cinema in southeast D.C. in which nine men were killed. Hinson denied that he was gay or bisexual and managed to win reelection. In the words of one supporter, “some folks would rather have a queer conservative than a macho liberal.”

Alas, the tolerance of Hinson’s constituents for a “queer conservative” would be exhausted just a few months later, when Hinson was arrested for administering oral sex to a Library of Congress employee in a Longworth House Office building bathroom. That the other man was Black did not help Hinson in his conservative southern constituency, and following a huge public outcry, he resigned.

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: Passing a deal on Ukraine aid and the border in January will be difficult given the government funding deadlines and Trump’s likely opposition, but it may be the last chance for a deal, Punchbowl argues.

Playbook: Senators might bail on Washington early this week given the stalled state of border talks.

The Early 202: Republicans are staring down potentially messy primaries in Michigan, Ohio, Montana, Nevada, and Wisconsin that could complicate their efforts to retake the Senate.

White House

• Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. CQ Brown head to Israel Monday. They’ll be pushing the government to outline benchmarks for its war effort while providing guidance on how the country can scale back its assault on Gaza to focus on targeted operations aimed at Hamas leaders rather than mass bombings. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters last week that Israeli would transition their war to a “more precise” phase. Some are hoping the accidental shooting of three Israeli hostages could push Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to rethink its approach.
• Meanwhile, the Biden administration is in talks with the Palestinian Authority about how its security forces can play a role in postwar Gaza — even though Netanyahu vehemently opposes the idea.
• After the annual Thanksgiving Turkey pardon, President Biden confronted a small group of close aides about his low poll numbers and asked how they planned to fix them. — Washington Post.

Congress

• Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. let loose on Netanyahu Sunday, calling him an “exceptionally difficult partner” who “has done everything he can to undermine a positive vision for peace for Israel.” The comments from Coons — a close ally of the White House — followed after Netanyahu told reporters he was “proud” of preventing a two-state solution.
• House Democrats are not happy with Dean Phillips. — Axios
• The left-leaning Congressional Integrity Project plans to launch a mobile billboard in Tompkinsville, Ky., where an AP investigation revealed Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. — co-leader of the Biden impeachment inquiry — owns land under a shell company along with a longtime donor.

Outside the Beltway

The Florida Republican Party censured and suspended its chairman, Michael Ziegler, on Sunday, slashing his salary to $1. The move followed after Sarasota police opened a rape investigation into Ziegler.

Global

• For the second time in less than two years, Chilean voters rejected a new proposed constitution on Saturday. The draft document was widely viewed as more conservative than the country’s current charter, which is a remnant from Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
• In related news: As Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig reported this weekend, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla. was photographed arm-in-arm with José Antonio Kast, the hard-right Chilean politician whose party led the failed constitutional rewrite. The two were in Buenos Aires to attend the inauguration of its new president, Javier Milei.

Polls

U.S. crime rates are down, but Gallup polling shows that 77% of people — including 58% of Democrats — think crime rates are worsening. That’s a problem for Biden: As with the economy, things are, according to the data, getting better, but voters can’t shake the feeling everything is getting worse. “News media stories and viral videos” may be driving the crime fears despite being unrepresentative, a criminologist told NBC News.

The WSJ plucks out another worrying sign for Biden from its most recent survey: 53% of voters say the president’s policies have hurt them personally, versus 23% who say they’ve been helped. Trump, in contrast, is above water: 49% say they were helped by his policies, while 37% say they were hurt.

2024

• Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. told CNN there’s “no timeline” for when he’ll decide on whether to launch a third-party presidential bid.
• How’s everyone reacting to Donald Trump’s weekend disquisition about how immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”? Well, the Biden campaign accused him of parroting Adolf Hitler, while Republicans (other than Christie) mostly seemed to wave it off. “I could care less what language people use as long as we get it right,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. said on “Meet the Press” Sunday, explaining he was more worried about fixing the border.
• Jeff Roe’s exit at Never Back Down caps a brutal month for the pro-DeSantis super PAC.
• Some Arizona Republicans tried to urge Kari Lake’s primary opponent, Mark Lamb, to instead run against Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz., who was part of the band of members who helped oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
• Cenk Uygur, the Turkish-born progressive running a primary campaign against Biden, has made it onto four state ballots: Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas, and Vermont. None had denied him ballot access because he wasn’t a natural-born citizen, an issue that has kept him out of the primary in other states. “I suspect they view it as I do, which is that it’s a constitutional law question for the courts to decide,” Uygur told Semafor.

Big Read

Semafor’s Max Tani reports on the scramble among politicians to connect with social media influencers and the consultants working to facilitate it. “The young people under 35 that watched the [Republican] debate is in the tens of thousands,” Stuart Perelmuter, the CEO of the influencer network atAdvocacy said. “We’re reaching them by the 10s of millions every single day.”

Blindspot

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, according to data from our partners at Ground News.

What the Left isn’t reading: The Pentagon missed its recruitment goals for the year by 41,000, and will enter 2024 with the smallest force in 80 years.

What the Right isn’t reading: Donald Trump told a crowd in Nevada that three people being arraigned in the state’s fake elector scheme are being treated “unfairly.”

Principals Team

Editors: Benjy Sarlin, Jordan Weissmann, Morgan Chalfant

Editor-at-Large: Steve Clemons

Reporters: Kadia Goba, Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Shelby Talcott, David Weigel

• COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber has achieved something unprecedented for an oil executive: Winning fans among climate activists.
• African filmmakers prepare for a tough 2024 after a stream of major African releases this year.
• A fight over how to cover Trump breaks out at The Messenger, a news organization launched with a plan to find an elusive center of media and politics.