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Hey, good morning. I'm Playwood co-Arthur Eugene Daniels. It is Thursday, January 18th. Here's what's driving the day.

We have a juicy story from our colleague, Daniel Lipman, who is scooping this morning that former

President Trump and folks in his inner circle have started to tell down-ballot Republican candidates

not to hire Republican strategists, veteran strategists, Jeff Rowe, or his political consulting

firm. That's after Rowe worked to try and elect Ron DeSantis.

You remember last week when President Trump was saying, oh, no, no political retribution.

Where this is exactly the opposite of that. Roe was a top strategist for the DeSantis Super

Pact, never backed down. He resigned in mid-December. And now candidates are being told that hiring

row in his firm would create a political problem for them with the Trump team. Also today,

the Senate is trying to figure out how to put a border in Ukraine deal together. And in that vein,

you had President Joe Biden meeting at the White House on Tuesday with members of Congress, including the big four.

After the meeting, everyone came out and did what they always do. They said that it was a productive meeting.

They said they got their points across. In the meeting, President Biden, according to the White House official, talked about the indispensable role of American leadership. He implored members of Congress to take that responsibility

very seriously. And both the White House and other folks that were in the room basically

said that there was broad bipartisan support and agreement that there needed to be some kind

of continuing funding to back Ukraine.

One thing that I found really interesting is that we're told that Jake Sullivan and the National

Security Advisor in Avrohains, she is the Director of National Intelligence, basically went

through a calendar, and this was the classified part of the meeting, talking about if we don't provide more

aid here, Ukraine will run out of this capability on this date at this point, really trying to

lay out the granular stakes for the members of Congress as they're continuing to negotiate

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