Good morning, everyone. I'm Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza. It's Friday, July 28th. Here's what's

driving the day. First, the Senate passed its version of the annual defense bill, the NDA,

with an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 86 to 11. As you'll remember, the House version was

loaded up with social policy amendments pushed by Republicans on issues such as abortion, the alleged rampant wokeism in the military, and climate change.

As the bill moves to a conference committee now, all eyes will be on Kevin McCarthy to see

what kind of a deal he can secure that moves a final version of the legislation to passage

in both chambers. There's a lot more

on that in this week's episode of Playbook Deep Dive. The second thing we're watching today is

the fallout over Mitch McConnell's health. Burgess Everett reports in Politico today that

McConnell is trying to silence GOP speculation about his future. He's telling his colleagues,

he's not going anywhere.

And then finally, on to the big news of the day, Jack Smith unveiled new charges against Donald Trump and a new third defendant in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

Joining me to discuss that, who else? Legal Affairs reporter and a very good friend of Playbook, Kyle Cheney.

Kyle, good morning. Good morning. Good to be with you, Ryan. Let's start with the basics.

What are these new charges? So if you remember the original indictment at about 37 charges in it

against Trump and his aide Walt Nauta. The new superseding indictment has

40 charges, which means to do the math, three new ones. And two of them are related to the

obstruction, the effort to obstruct investigators. And one of them is a new charge related to a

document that prosecutors now say Trump kept. He already had about

30 of those charges, but this new one is a particularly significant document that I'm sure

we'll get into. Well, yeah, two questions that. One is just the sort of keystone cops-like

way, details of this obstruction that's laid out in the superseding indictment.

...