Dear colleagues, your subcommittee could conceivably become part of a proud history of serious bipartisan oversight

stretching from the teapot dome investigation to the Boeing investigation to the Watergate hearings,

to the tobacco hearings, to the select committee on the January 6th attack.

Or it could take oversight down a very dark alley filled with conspiracy theories and

disinformation, a place where facts are the enemy and partisan destruction is the

overriding goal.

Well, it appears House Republicans are going to go with the dark alley path. The first hearing for the subcommittee to investigate the, quote, weaponization of the federal government was nothing but grievance politics. Meanwhile, in the Senate, minority leader Mitch McConnell is trying to distance the party from a fellow Republican senator, who could that be?

It comes as President Joe Biden takes his post-state-of-the-union message to Florida,

keeping the focus on the fate of Social Security and Medicare.

And his administration is receiving support from a prominent Republican over its handling of the Chinese

surveillance balloon. We'll have that and new details about the balloon from the State Department.

Good morning and welcome to Morning Joe. It is Friday. Friday. Finally, Willie, February 10th,

Joe is on assignment this morning. Willie, your pick for this Sunday, Sunday today, or Super Bowl? Well, my pick for Sunday today is Paul Rudd. More on that in a minute. But my pick for the Super Bowl, I've been thinking about it a lot. I think I'm going to stick with what I said last week, which I'm going to ride with the Chiefs. I'm a Giants fan, so I have a little bit of an

anti-Eagles bias, but on the other hand, I root for the team in my division. But my head is telling

me Mahomes, who won the MVP again last night, the Chiefs do it.

I think I'm with the Eagles. I've been taking in a lot of information from Joe and his son,

Jack. So I'll be watching Sunday today.

Paul Rudd, amazing.

How great.

We'll look forward to hearing more about that later.

Along with Willie and me, we have the host of way too early.

White House Bureau Chief at Politico, Jonathan Lemire.

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