Greetings from staff writer Timothy Noah! 

In the latest demonstration that President Trump and his allies considered every avenue to overturn the 2020 election, The Washington Post reports that a memo circulated among his allies suggested that he enlist the help of the supersecret National Security Agency. The provenance of the memo is a little unclear, but it was sent out after a January 4, 2021, meeting organized by MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, and, unsurprisingly, it appears that former national security adviser Michael Flynn was mixed up in it. “Honestly, I was not impressed by these people,” said Republican Senator Kevin Cramer, who attended. Lindell, you may recall, was photographed on January 15 of that year leaving the White House with a document in hand bearing the words “martial law” and “insurrection act.” Here’s what Flynn has been up to lately.

ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim Al Hashimi Al Qurayshi is dead. President Biden announced this morning that he ordered a commando raid in northwest Syria that targeted Al Qurayshi. An unnamed senior administration official said the terror leader detonated a bomb at the start of the raid that killed himself and members of his family, including children, The New York Times reports. If these details sound familiar, that’s because Al Qurayshi’s predecessor as ISIS leader, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, detonated a suicide vest when U.S. forces attacked his hideout in 2019.

Biden ordered 3,000 additional troops to Eastern Europe as the Ukraine standoff continued. Documents “accessed by” the Spanish daily El País detail an offer by the United States to furnish the Russians with a “transparency mechanism” showing it has no long-range Tomahawk missiles at NATO bases in Romania and Bulgaria. In exchange, Washington could choose two Russian missile bases where the Russians could use the same transparency mechanism to reassure NATO that it has no long-range missiles there. The documents were sent last week. 

“The basic message to Moscow,” report Steven Erlanger and Andrew E. Kramer in The New York Times, “was American and NATO resolve not to bow to Russian demands, in a dispute that has pushed relations to their worst since the Soviet era.” The Times’ David Sanger puzzles over “whether, in trying to disrupt Moscow’s actions by revealing them in advance, the administration is deterring Russian action or spurring it on.”

The Washington football team has a new name. Please welcome … the Commanders. “A fair amount” of fans said they disliked the name “for its militaristic sound and lack of creativity,” reports Andrew Golden of The Washington Post. (Unmentioned in Golden’s piece is that The Commanders was also the title of a 1991 book about the Persian Gulf War by the Post’s own Bob Woodward.) It’s a tradition for D.C. to burden its sports teams with pompous assertions of its status as a world capital. (The baseball team is called the Nationals, and the hockey team is called the Capitals.)

At NewRepublic.com, Melissa Gira Grant considers Trump’s “open call to exact retribution on Black elected officials” investigating him for infractions too numerous to identify. Such delegitimization, she observes, recalls the language of Southern white terror during Reconstruction. Daniel Strauss spotlights Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s momentary abandonment of lockstep partisanship to champion South Carolina District Judge Michelle Childs for the Supreme Court. It’s a reminder of former House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s dictum that all politics is local. And Eleanor Cummins explains the centrality of tracking human body waste to understand the current and future pandemics.

Cheers,

Every day, our journalists are exposing the right’s assaults on our democracy—and pushing the Democrats to go bold to preserve the republic. Here’s a special offer from The New Republic so you won’t miss their scoops and sharp analysis.

Yesterday’s geopolitics question: As nearly as you can, rank the world’s 10 largest armies. 

Answer: China (2.18 million), India (1.45 million), United States (1.38 million), North Korea (1.28 million), then Russia, Pakistan, Iran, South Korea, Vietnam, and Egypt.

Today’s Olympics question: I’m on record arguing that the Summer Olympics should be headquartered permanently in Greece, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t do the same for the winter games, which begin tomorrow in Beijing. Yes, Greece has ski resorts. One, poetically, is situated on Mount Parnassus! Instead, the Olympics travel quadrennially from nation to nation like the Flying Dutchman of legend, dotting the world with ghost-town Olympic villages. 

The first Winter Olympics were held in 1924. Question: What was the location? Bonus question:The very first gold medal at the first Winter Olympics was won by an American. What was his name, and what was his sport?