Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Dylan Byers. Tonight, news and notes on Tucker Carlson’s fundraising plan and Fox’s new primetime strategy. Tina Nguyen will be back tomorrow with updates from inside Kevin McCarthy’s fractious House G.O.P. conference.

But first…

By Abby Livingston

• Biden’s Benghazi: It’s already abundantly clear by now that Hunter Biden’s guilty plea won’t conclude the House Republican efforts to investigate the president’s son and the unsubstantiated claims of a “Biden crime family” conspiracy. Nevertheless, it’s an open question regarding whether Republicans can draw political blood on the topic. Some G.O.P. operatives that I talk to roll their eyes at the whole matter, which they dismiss as a fringe infatuation of the “very online right,” akin to Vince Foster’s tragic suicide during the Clinton administration. “Hunter Biden is only a thing with MAGA and Jamie Comer,” a Texas G.O.P. consultant told me on Wednesday afternoon.

  But another Republican source, who’s plugged into the party’s billionaire circles, told me that he sees a great deal of enthusiasm for the House investigations, which could be leveraged for campaign ads next year, perhaps Swift Boat-style. One model for this strategy is the Benghazi investigation, an overhyped esoteric endeavor that never turned up actionable dirt on Hillary but nevertheless became a centerpiece of the 2016 campaign. More importantly, the Benghazi investigation inadvertently revealed Clinton used an illegal email server. (Of course, Foster led to Whitewater, which led to Lewinsky…)

• Dialing for Dollars: Hakeem Jeffries is slowly easing doubts that he couldn’t sustain the fundraising magic of his predecessor, Nancy Pelosi. The Democrats’ new leader spent Tuesday night in Chicago, bringing in $1.5 million to the House campaign arm, per Politico, passing the tin amid a swell crowd that included Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, plus several members of the Illinois congressional delegation, along with D.C.C.C. Chairwoman Suzan DelBene. In fact, the 2024 D.C.C.C. is doing about as well as the committee fared at this point two years ago, in Pelosi’s final hurrah: Jeffries-led Democrats have raised nearly $10 million more this cycle, hauling in $54.5 million and counting, although the current D.C.C.C. lags a bit in cash on hand, with $28 million in the bank, compared to $36 million two years ago. (The better comparison, a D.C.C.C. source noted, may be the last off-year presidential cycle, when the committee raised $49 million between January and May 2019.)
• Speaking of Pelosi…: The former House speaker has been eyeing at least a couple of Senate races, including the effort to help elect Adam Schiff, one of her oldest and most trusted lieutenants during the Trump years. Perhaps more surprisingly, she is raising money for Senate hopeful Ruben Gallego in his challenge to Kyrsten Sinema, who has mostly defected from her party to be an independent. Sure, lots of Democrats dislike Sinema, but I was nonetheless surprised because Pelosi rarely veers outside her lane. In her leadership years, she had veritable tunnel vision when it came to the district-by-district slog to win the gavel.

  But her support for Gallego stuck in my mind for a different reason, too. Sinema supported Pelosi for leader during her first year in Congress, in 2013, but spent the rest of her House career supporting John Lewis, as a protest vote. On the scale of things a caucus member could do to annoy the leader, this was benign. These sorts of rebellious votes were generally understood to be a tactic for members in vulnerable districts—like Sinema’s—to avoid TV ads slamming them for voting for Pelosi. But it was always my sense that the rank-and-file understood that Pelosi herself was not amused.

The eight remaining members of the Tucker Carlson Tonight team were told Monday that they would need to leave by mid-July, with the option to reapply for new positions. Such an outcome doesn’t seem terribly likely, of course. I am told that the vast majority of these employees will instead reunite with Tucker, who is currently posting Twitter videos from his barn in Maine, with bigger media ambitions afoot.

In any event, the reputational battle lines were drawn long beforehand, from the moment the Murdochs decided that there was a limit to how much rogue behavior they were willing to tolerate from a nativist, conspiratorial, defamation-adjacent modern-day Father Coughlin with a soft spot for Putin, even if he did rate. Tucker’s subsequent decision to compete with the network by trying to outflank it on the right, via Elon, all but necessitated Fox’s dissolution of his remaining loyalists.

Tucker’s prospects at Twitter remain an open question. His inconsistent, ten-minute video monologues ostensibly play to audiences in the tens of millions but lack an obvious monetization strategy. Even if Elon-buddy David Sacks has protested on the platform that his view count reaches nine-figures, CPMs are preposterously lower in digital media, and Twitter has yet to command the sort of premium advertising that newly appointed C.E.O. Linda Yaccarino fantasizes about. (For a grim look at the company’s debt picture, read my partner Bill Cohan’s latest piece, which is making the rounds on Wall Street.) It’s increasingly possible that the Twitter show is a top-of-funnel play for other things Tucker may soon have cooking.

In fact, I am told he is raising capital to launch a new company that may yet prove more influential. He’ll certainly benefit from an incongruous number of ultra wealthy conservative media investors and a scant (though growing) number of opportunities, as Glenn Beck and the tandem of Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing have demonstrated. A decade ago, the Mercers seemed like lone wolves in their patronage of Breitbart. These days, conservative mediacos are popping up more rampantly, as capital finds opportunities and the conversation moves further and further to the fringes.

Tucker, the movement’s biggest star in a generation, may be able to test the boundaries. It will certainly represent the latest iteration, for better or worse, in the creator economy. And while it might sound slightly insane, given the differences in their politics and audiences, Tucker’s new media play might—if executed adroitly—serve as a paradigm for a generation of TV news personalities with huge followings and fandoms who remain marooned to their desks amid shrinking audiences. Fox will obviously be paying breathless attention to his developments, despite protestations to the contrary, but so will executives and CNN and MSNBC.

After all, Fox has always shown an incredible knack for in-house talent development, and the promotion of Watters (who got his start as Bill O’Reilly’s lib-baiting man on the street) and Gutfeld (who once hosted the overnight Red Eye show) are testament to their internal incubation and inculcation factory. Watters has proven quite capable of stoking right-wing grievances and anti-liberal suspicions in a more legally responsible fashion than his predecessor. Gutfeld’s cringey, quasi-comedic trolling of liberals now outrates Fallon and Kimmel.

Last week, I noted that Fox’s post-Tucker strategy would, in many ways, be a return to form for the network, with Bret Baier & Co. providing the patina of hard news while these prime-time stars massaged the right-wing erogenous zones without drifting too far into the conspiratorial fever swamps. As The New York Times noted this week in a lengthy profile of Gutfeld, “merry trolling” and “insult conservatism” will now become “an institutional voice for the next generation” of Fox News viewers. (Fittingly, all three men seemed to be smirking in the promotional material.) And indeed, that may be just enough to offset the nascent challengers on the right—Tucker, Newsmax, etcetera—for the remainder of linear television’s claim on American culture and politics.