today on inside politics, hunter in the house. the president s son making a surprise appearance on capitol hill to watch a house committee meeting called to hold him in contempt of congress. chaos, shall we say, ensued. plus, it s debate night in des moines. get ready for nikki haley and ron desantis to go head to head for the first time live on cnn. the stakes incredibly high with just five days left for the top trump alternatives to chip away at his massive lead. and demanding answers. multiple investigations are under way after the pentagon waited weeks to reveal the defense secretary was battling cancer. why was even president biden kept in the dark until yesterday? i m manu raju in for dana bash. let s go behind the headlines and inside politics. first up, capitol hill meets reality tv. a wild scene as house republicans were starting to move toward punishing hunter biden for refusing to sit for a closed door deposition when the president s son showed up. hunter b
a remarkable turnaround today for the republican leader. mccarthy promised progress, he promised it tuesday and promised it wednesday, promised it thursday. today we finally saw it. even as he failed on his 13th ballot. 15 rebel holdouts today switched their votes in favor of mccarthy, giving him for the first time this whole week more votes than the democratic leader hakeem jeffries, but despite this break in the republican resistance, six hardliners remain and congress people matt gaetz, bob good, andy harris, elle crane andy harris is not one of them. it s a different individual. in any case, the six are keeping mccarthy two votes short of the magic number needing needed to realize his dream of clinching the speaker s gavel. straight to chief congressional correspondent manu raju live on capitol hill. mccarthy won over much of the republican opposition today. he s still short of enough votes to win. how does he get the final two votes he nooesz? right now the top lea
politics at this moment. but there have been moments where the white house and hunter biden s legal team didn t exactly see eye to eye on the more aggressive strategy approach. really they have taken, the white house has taken this hands-off approach, not engaging in every twist and turn of hunter biden s legal drama. we ll wait to see what they have to say later today about his appearance today. i m sure republicans will be asking did the president talk to his son about this. i m not sure they ll get those answers. thanks for this. tia, let s talk about the president. how do you think the president views this moment right now? they don t want to be talking about hunter biden. they want to be talking about their agenda or donald trump. yeah. i think the president i would guess that the president is frustrated about it all. you know, he feels that his son is being targeted, he feels like it s politically motivated to hurt him, his administration, and his campaign. but i think th
improve voter access and improve the integrity of the process from my perspective at any point prior to that, so it s a real it s a real honor to serve governor-elect shapiro. have you been sworn in yet? no, not yet. the incoming governor will be sworn in on the 17th of january. i didn t know if i should say thank you to commissioner schmidt or secretary schmidt. i will say thank you to commissioner schmidt and hope your eastgles win this weekend. thanks so much. thank you. this note, cnn will air a special presentation of the discovery plus original film called january 6th that is tomorrow night at 8:00 eastern. other big news this hour, the strike given ukraine reason to dismiss russia s claims of a cease fire. stay with us .
get 218 votes and pass legislation on the floor. if doing every tiny thing takes what we ve seen for the last four days for this republican majority, it s going to be worse i had sort of anticipated this would be lurching from crisis to crisis from the debt ceiling to all these unpredictable things, i think what we ve seen laid out this week is going to be worse than we could have imagined. manu raju is reporting matt gaetz, perhaps the leader of the rebels, the most anti-kevin congressman, walking off the floor of the house acknowledged mccarthy will likely become speaker, although he said, we basically he ll likely win, but we fitted him in a nice straightjacket. what a way to start to govern. look, i think to your point, the members who are like congressman stewart. they do not know what wa exactl when we all sat down together