Better in their words…

Clintons agree to sworn depositions; Musk merges SpaceX & xAI; Dems fume over Tulsi at Fulton raid; another Squad millionaire emerges; GOP cracks silent filibuster to pass SAVE Act.

Source: THE MEANING OF ‘IS’ ☙ Tuesday, February 3, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS

ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY🇺🇸🌍

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Oh, frabjous day! Somewhere between the frozen circles of Hell and the fiery pits of Gehenna, Satan just requested a space heater. Bill and Hillary Clinton have agreed to testify under oath about Jeffrey Epstein. The New York Times ran a breaking story this morning, headlined, “Clintons Capitulate on House Epstein Inquiry, Agreeing to Testify.” I guess mocking Steve Bannon’s jail sentence for refusing to testify wasn’t such a hot idea, huh, Hillary?

The sub-headline explained, “Former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, the ex-secretary of state, agreed to depositions they had long resisted— just days before the House was to vote to hold them in contempt.”

The Clintons’ chickens are coming home to roost— on Pedo Island. For thirty years, the Clintons have treated congressional subpoenas like Nigerian prince emails— acknowledged with a smirk and immediately deleted. But yesterday, as the House was literally mid-vote to hold them in contempt, the most Teflon couple in American political history finally ran out of non-stick spray.

They tried everything and House Republicans held the line. How about written statements? Rejected. A four-hour interview in New York where Bill could bill by the hour? Rejected. Hillary submitting a sworn pinky-promise instead of showing up? Rejected. The Clintons’ lawyers fired off a flurry of desperate last-minute emails more creative than a middle-schooler explaining why his test answers were identical to the girl right in front of him.

Then, mid-committee-meeting, as Chairman James Comer (R-Ky) was literally testifying about holding them in contempt, their attorney fired off a desperate email: Fine. We’ll come. “The Clintons,” the Times admitted, “ultimately waved the white flag and agreed to fully comply with Mr. Comer’s demands.” It was total surrender. “The Clintons on Monday evening agreed to all of Mr. Comer’s demands, removing any time limit on the deposition of Mr. Clinton or on the range of topics that Republicans could ask him about.”

Only two weeks ago, the Clintons remained defiant. “Every person has to decide when they have seen or had enough and are ready to fight for this country, its principles and its people, no matter the consequences,” the Clintons wrote in an overlong letter to Chairman Comer on January 13th. “For us, now is that time.”

Haha, well, not exactly ‘no matter the consequences.’ Apparently not if the consequences include four months in chokey.

🔥 This is another one for the history books. The records are toppling like dominoes these days. “For Mr. Clinton to testify in the Epstein investigation would be nearly unprecedented,” the Times somberly reported. “No former president has appeared before Congress since 1983, when President Gerald R. Ford did so to discuss the celebration of the 1987 bicentennial.”

After months of insisting that the majesty of the office required that former presidents not be subjected to this indignity, last night their spokesman bravely pivoted and said the Clintons “look forward to setting a precedent that applies to everyone.” Give me a break.

This, from a woman who ran a classified email server from her bathroom closet. From the family that BleachBit-scrubbed 33,000 subpoenaed emails, smashed BlackBerries with hammers, and told congressional investigators to go pound sand for three decades. Bill Clinton flew on Epstein’s Lolita Express at least 26 times, according to flight logs. Sometimes he ditched his Secret Service detail. He visited Epstein’s island. He accepted Epstein’s money. He posed for photographs, some of which are hard to look at before eating.

The Clintons lecturing about equal treatment is like Jeffrey Dahmer complaining about portion sizes at Applebee’s.

Now they must testify under oath, under penalty of perjury, with a court reporter recording every syllable in writing. I’m sure it’ll go great. Bill Clinton has a sterling history with sworn testimony.

🔥 If they think potential contempt charges were threatening, wait till Bill and Hillary start considering what the Republicans might do with perjury charges. Jail for contempt is measured in months. Prison for perjury is measured in years. Bill was already disbarred for lying under oath about Monica Lewinsky— and that was at the pinnacle of his Teflon status, for a relatively trivial Oval Office dalliance.

Now he’s agreed to another deposition, this one about cavorting with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. In 2026. With millions of Epstein files surging around the internet. With a deposition transcript that will almost certainly be published online, thanks to the Epstein Transparency Act. What could possibly go wrong? I wonder if they’ll ask the former president about Epstein’s portrait of him? 🍿

Think about the undisclosed reasons Hillary is also being deposed. Bill’s the one with the flight logs, the photographs, and the “arms-length friendship.” What does Hillary know about Epstein that requires sworn testimony? What does House Oversight know about what Hillary knows? I’m sure it’s nothing. The Clintons have always been so forthcoming about their associates. Just ask Vince Foster. Oh wait. Sorry, you can’t.

Will we finally learn what “is” means?

🔥 Not to beat a bleach-bit Clinton, but let’s take one more moment to consider the incredible, astounding, made-for-TV timing. Just as the Clinton deposition demand was reaching its crescendo, literally millions of new Epstein documents flooded out as if from a burst sewer main. Bill Gates’ STD tests. British royalty in their underwear. Politicians, professors, princes — all scrambling like a nest of silverfish when the exterminator shows up.

And it was now, right at this precise historic moment, after months of steadfast defiance, the Clintons suddenly decided that testifying under oath is actually fine. Can you see how perfectly it played out? The Epstein files made it politically possible to hold the Clintons in contempt. Indeed, a bunch of Democrats on the House Oversight Committee joined Republicans in voting for contempt.

Not because they believe in the “rule of law.” Because of the optics.Democrats just spent a year demanding Epstein transparency. At long, long, last, the Clintons finally ran out of slimy trails to dodge down, and were cornered.

You think this incredible timing was just a fortuitous coincidence? Does it maybe put Trump’s delay in releasing the Epstein files last year in a different light?

🔥 For three decades, the Clintons have been America’s most unsquashable political cockroaches— surviving scandals that would have instantly vaporized anyone else. Whitewater. Travelgate. Lewinsky. Email servers. Benghazi. The Foundation. Uranium One. Hot Dog-gate.

But every single time, they scurried away unscathed, protected by a media palace guard and a Justice Department that couldn’t find probable cause with a GPS and a sherpa. They had no reason to believe they wouldn’t ooze out again. But then Trump’s DOJ arrested Epstein. And Epstein died in a cell with cameras that mysteriously malfunctioned. And the files got seized. And now those files are public.

And now … the Clintons were forced to answer questions under oath. Without any heads-up or warning, Bob’s your uncle, the Clintons suddenly looked down and realized they’re standing in a coffin.

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Welp, scratch off yet another historic record. I hope you are enjoying life here in Surreal City. The BBC ran another major breaking story this morning, headlined, “Musk’s SpaceX and xAI merge to make world’s most valuable private company.” The world’s richest man just made the most audacious corporate move since Rockefeller realized oil wells work better when you own all of them. SpaceX has acquired xAI (which owns Twitter/X and Grok) in a deal valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion — making it the most valuable private company in human history.

Musk is playing chess against himself, on a board in orbit around Jupiter. The online chatter confirms the obvious— the space billionaire is preparing for something. One obvious next step everyone is talking about is taking the newly-merged company public in what will be the biggest stock debut in history, yawn, another record crushed. Some wonder whether he’ll merge SpaceX into Tesla as part of the deal— a mega-corporation worth more than the annual gross product of most countries on Earth.

You can’t make this up: a man who already owns a rocket company, an electric car company, a brain implant company, a tunneling company, a social media platform, and an AI company has decided what he really needs is to put the AI company inside the rocket company. Because why have data centers on Earth where you can just, I don’t know, plug them in, when you could put them in space where the only things you need to worry about are the cold vacuum of death and occasional space debris traveling at 17,000 mph.

The SEC is going to need a bigger org chart.

🚀 With appropriate humility, it seems to me that corporate media’s speculations on Musk’s plans —characterized as whimsy, impulse, or an erratic OCD— are far off the mark. SpaceX already owns Starlink — the satellite network providing internet to 100+ countries. When SpaceX acquired xAI, it didn’t just acquire artificial intelligence. It acquired the global public square. 500 million daily active users. The place where news breaks, trends start, and narratives are born.

Let that marinate: One company now owns the internet delivery system andthe platform people use when they get online. That’s not vertical integration; it’s diagonal integration — across industries that nobody else imagined would touch.

But wait— there’s more. Musk’s $1 trillion comp package at Tesla requires two things: building a million robots and increasing Tesla’s stock value tenfold. How do you 10x a top-priced auto company already worth $800 billion? He can’t do it with cars, even self-driving ones. He can’t even do it with robots.

But what if he next merges SpaceX into Tesla? Think about it. xAI goes into SpaceX. SpaceX goes into Tesla. Suddenly, Tesla isn’t a car company. It’s not even a tech company. It’s a civilization-stack company. Cars, robots, energy, space, AI, global internet service, social media, and payments (xMoney, long teased).

The truth is, we can’t even imagine the possibilities. Take just one— advertising. Tesla has famously spent exactly $0 on traditional advertising. Zero Super Bowl ads. Zero billboards. Zero “Built Tesla Tough” jingles. They’ve relied entirely on word of mouth and Elon’s Twitter feed. But what happens when Tesla owns the Twitter feed?

Ford, GM, and Toyota are paying millions to advertise on X— paying rent to their competitor’s platform. Tesla’s competitors are literally funding the Tesla empire. It’s as if McDonald’s had to buy commercial time on a network owned by Burger King. How do other carmakers compete with that? They can’t out-advertise them— Tesla owns the platform. They can’t out-tech them— Tesla owns the AI. They can’t out-infrastructure them — Tesla owns the satellites.

I could be wrong about all this. SpaceX might not go public. It might not merge with Tesla. But Musk must have some kind of plan to earn his $1 trillion bonus, no? Let me know what you think.

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Yesterday, furious Congressional Democrats officiously demanded to know why DNI Tulsi Gabbard attended the weekend’s Atlanta ballot raid. Reuters reported, “Tulsi Gabbard says Trump requested her presence at FBI raid in Fulton County.” Checkmate, morons.

Democrats are very concerned that the Director of National Intelligence showed up to oversee an FBI operation related to national election security. This is apparently a huge scandal because the DNI’s job is to … checks notes … coordinate intelligence related to election security. I know what you’re thinking: “Jeff, surely there’s more to Democrat arguments than that?” And the answer is: No. That’s literally it. She showed up to her job, and corporate media acts like she was caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel wearing a Nixon mask.

Democrats spent four years claiming our elections were compromised by Russia, demanded investigation after investigation, impeached the president over a phone call, and launched three separate criminal cases over “election interference” — but when President Trump actually sends someone to investigate election integrity? Suddenly, investigating elections is “authoritarian.”

The only thing more predictable than Democrat double standards is their inability to count them.

Gabbard calmly replied to hysterical demands from Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees with a soothing letter. “The Presidentspecifically directed me to be present for the execution of the search warrant,” the DNI explained. “My presence was requested by the President and executed under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security, including counter-intelligence, foreign and other malign influence, and cybersecurity.”

Shifting it straight to Trump was genius. Democrats, even those on the intelligence oversight committees, can’t demand that President Trump answer their silly questions, thanks to the separation of powers. They don’t oversee the President.

Reuters, of course, quoted nobody who agreed with Gabbard’s involvement, despite there being about 150 million of us. Fake news alert! Instead, the paper quoted a random former government lawyer, who now has no access or personal knowledge, but still squeaked, “The DNI has authorities set out by statute, and they don’t include investigating past elections for potential fraud.”

It was the dumbest argument I’ve ever heard. Why don’t past elections provide useful intelligence for securing future elections? It just shows that anybody can be a former government lawyer. Probably a DEI hire.

The Fulton County operation is just the latest example of masterful Trump operational surprise. Democrats and their media allies never saw this coming, and now they are desperately playing catchup, trying to figure out what Trump is up to. He’s running rings around them.

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So far, two members of the anticapitalist Squad now have mystery wealth problems. The latest is high-school graduate Ayanna Pressley (D-Ma.). Fox ran an exclusive exposé yesterday headlined, “Rep. Pressley’s surging net worth and assets exposed in new report.”

Tuesday’s financial tip: If you want to turn negative net worth into $8 million in six years, consider —hear me out— a career in Congress. Sure, the salary is only $174,000, but you can access information about legislation that might affect various industries, and your spouse can start a “consulting firm” that advises companies who might be interested in that information. This is completely different from insider trading because, shuffles papers, well, because Congress says so. And they would know. They wrote the rules!

In fairness, since she joined the Congressional millionaires’ club, Representative Pressley has shifted her rhetoric up a notch, to complaining about billionaires:

Fox dug through her financial disclosures, and discovered she was dead broke (negative net worth) when she entered Congress in 2021, and is now suddenly worth $8 million. Her husband quit his low-paying job at the same time, and now runs a DC-based “consulting” firm, which is political-speak for influence grifter.

Crack-addled Hunter Biden was also a well-compensated “consultant.” Just saying.

Ayanna Pressley lectures us about income inequality from a net worth that grew by $8 million while she was supposedly working for us at $174K a year. That’s not congressional salary — that’s a money printer. But please, tell us more about how capitalism is unfair while your husband’s “consulting firm” mysteriously rakes in millions from companies affected by your votes.

You’ve probably also heard about Representative Ilhan Omar — the Minnesota muslim who recently called America the “U.S. G-ddamn States” — and who has somehow amassed as much as $30 million while in Congress, despite arriving as a Somalian refugee. Shrewd investments, apparently. The House Oversight Committee is now investigating her.

🔥 A larger set of dots is slowly emerging from the fog of political war. It’s still percolating, but let me give you a teaser.

Democrats and their neocon allies ran a classic color revolution in Ukraine during the Obama years by exposing a series of high-profile corruption cases.That understandably made Ukrainian voters furious and hate their government. Then Team Obama ran in the green lantern, the heroic comedian with zero political background on an anti-corruption platform— and you know the rest. Zelensky completed Victoria Nuland’s deep-state takeover of that poor, benighted country.

Live by the color revolution, die by the color revolution.

Now, unless I am seeing things, in an irony of historic proportions, the same sort of corruption operation is boomeranging back against the same Democrat party that originally toppled Ukraine’s democratically elected government the same way. Think about it. Minnesota. California. Ilhan. Ayanna. SNAP. Medicaid. Etc.

That’s one front in the color revolution. A possible second front is the Epstein files, which have just resulted in the historic-first public deposition of beloved Democrat president and frequent Lolita flyer Bill Clinton. And don’t forget the 2020 election investigation. Are the Democrats under assault from all sides? Is this The Reckoning™? If it continues, can the Democrat party survive?

Maybe it’s all just a happy coincidence, just more fortuitous timing. What do you think? And … who’s running the op?

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Things are popping faster this month than they did in January. In more last-minute essential news, late yesterday, Representatives Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) told reporters that Senate Majority Leader John Thune will revive the “standing filibuster” to break the silentfilibuster and hold a vote on the upgraded SAVE Act, which requires proof of citizenship and Voter ID for federal elections. It’s the solution we’ve been pushing for!

CLIP: Rep. Luna says ‘we got assurances on the standing filibuster’ (1:04).

A standing filibuster forces senators to actually debate on the floor (rather than enjoying an automatic silent filibuster), which would allow the Act’s passage with only 50 votes— assuming Republicans hold together, and Vice-President JD Vance stands by to break any tie.

As a reminder, the silent filibuster is a 70’s-era innovation designed to protect senators from having to listen to their colleagues from across the aisle babble incoherently for hours at the podium in the classic filibuster style, which was once called a “standing filibuster.” The 1972 rule change allowed senators to just say they would filibuster, which automatically tabled the pending vote and required 60 votes to end the “filibuster”—which they dishonestly call “ending debate.” Even though nobody’s actually debating anything.

C&C’s position has been that they don’t need to “nuke” the whole filibuster rule. Just tweak it. Roll back the pre-70s rule change and make senators actually debate. End the automatic “silent” rule. It appears Republicans got the message. They have now discovered a secret weapon against the 60-vote threshold: making senators actually work. A fate worse than popping up in the Epstein files.

In other words, the odds for passing the SAVE Act in time to affect the midterms just shot up on the betting markets. Which means things are about to get lit. The Democrats cannot afford to let the SAVE Act pass, which means they are about to pull out all the stops. My imagination boggles at the ludicrous scenes about to unfold.

Either way, get the microwave ready. It’s popcorn time. 🍿

Have a terrific Tuesday! Get back here tomorrow, your kernels fully popped, for the latest C&C drop— with another microwaveable bag of essential news and snartastic commentary.

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