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TOXIC TIMELINE — Four months after a Norfolk Southern train carrying a toxic cocktail of hazardous materials derailed there, East Palestine, Ohio, is back in the news.

Chemical company CEOs, union officials, railroad lobbyists and federal investigators are descending upon the village of 5,000 for a two-day field hearing this week to dig deep into the causes and outcomes of the Feb. 3 derailment, which set off a fireball and sent a toxic black plume to hover over people’s homes, schools and businesses.

There’s a lot of unfinished business to discuss.

But before the hearing kicks off Thursday, spanning 19 hours over two days, community members will have their chance at the microphone. The community meeting scheduled for Wednesday night is supposed to be a venue for residents to learn more about the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigative process. But don’t be surprised to hear residents raise concerns about water quality, dead fish, declining home values and their kids’ unexplained nosebleeds.

“There are some people in town who didn’t evacuate at all,” said Misti Allison, an East Palestine parent who became the face of the community after she testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in March about the disaster. “But then you still have some people, even months later, that are still relocated. And some of those people, they even come to their house, they’re there for an hour or so and they’re starting to get eye irritations or starting to get rashes.”

In the months since the cameras — and everyone from Donald Trump to Erin Brokovich and everyone else who used East Palestine as a stage upon which to score political points — have left town, anxieties and resentments have continued to fester. Many continue to feel that the federal response was “lackluster,” in Allison’s words, or that Norfolk Southern’s repeated promises to “make it right” have been haphazardly honored.

A family assistance center run by the railroad sometimes reimburses people for water filters and lodging away from home and sometimes doesn’t, Allison said.

Norfolk Southern said they’ve provided $17 million in assistance to nearly 10,000 families to date and that some of the confusion might stem from who is and who isn’t inside the evacuation zone. And after initially resisting the idea, Norfolk Southern has agreed to help compensate East Palestine homeowners for the decline in their home values — especially important to those who feel unsafe and are eager to move but can’t sell their house for anything close to what it was worth before the derailment.

Even if the cameras are gone, the politics are never far from the surface. Republicans continue to whack President Joe Biden for not visiting the site of the toxic derailment — today, on the eve of the field hearing, the Republican National Committee accused him of lying about his intention to go to East Palestine, and noted that the president was instead in California attending a fundraiser.

Back in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine is resisting calls from some protestors to declare an emergency — his office says FEMA has made it clear they’d reject it — and Norfolk Southern is fighting state and federal lawsuits trying to force the railroad to cover more of the costs of the cleanup. Some residents have called for the CDC to do a long-term health study, amid fears that a “cancer cluster” could hit the community down the line. When the CDC sent a team to East Palestine in March to study the health effects of the disaster, half the team got sick.

If Wednesday night’s community meeting goes off script and becomes a forum for residents to vent their frustrations and fears, this is the sort of dirty laundry that might get aired.

The investigative hearing that follows will feature testimony about the full gamut of technical details involved in the derailment — tank car specifications and the proper temperature setting for alarms to start sounding about overheating wheel parts — but one focus will likely be on the decision to vent and burn toxic chemicals. DeWine’s press secretary, Dan Tierney, said the choice was between a controlled release or “an uncontrolled release with a catastrophic failing of the railcars that could have led to shrapnel being sent a mile in any direction.” NTSB will examine the decision-making and the result of that process.

Hundreds of pages of evidence will be released as part of the NTSB docket as the hearing begins Thursday morning.

Meanwhile, railroad safety legislation could come to the Senate floor next month. Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, who has been working to get nine Republicans to support the bill for a filibuster-proof majority, has said he’s confident he has the votes to pass the bill.

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— House GOP vows to continue Biden probes despite Hunter’s ‘sweetheart’ deal: House Republicans are lambasting the plea deal between the Justice Department and Hunter Biden as proof of a federal law enforcement double standard — and warning it won’t derail their months-long investigation into the president and his family. The charges, which are the culmination of a years-long federal investigation into the president’s son, immediately sparked accusations of a “double standard” by House Republicans, who are conducting a far-reaching investigation into the business deals of Hunter Biden and other family members as they hunt for an elusive link to Joe Biden. No evidence has emerged that the then-vice president’s actions were influenced by his family’s business agreements.

— Judge sets tentative trial date for Trump documents case: Donald Trump’s criminal trial for hoarding military secrets at Mar-a-Lago has a starting date — Aug. 14 — but don’t expect it to hold. U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon bookmarked the last two weeks in August for the historic trial, part of an omnibus order setting some early ground rules and deadlines for the case. That would represent a startlingly rapid pace for a case that is expected to be complicated and require lengthy pretrial wrangling over extraordinarily sensitive classified secrets.

REMAKING THE COURT — For decades, the ambitions of Florida’s Republican governors were stymied by the liberal-leaning state Supreme Court. That is, until Ron DeSantis was elected, reports the Washington Post.

Now, it’s poised to rule on the governor’s plan to outlaw most abortions in the third-most-populous state. The hard-right turn was by design. DeSantis seized on the unusual retirement of three liberal justices at once to quickly remake the court. He did so with the help of a secretive panel led by Leonard Leo — the key architect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority — that quietly vetted judicial nominees in an Orlando conference room three weeks before the governor’s inauguration.

CONSTITUTIONAL CLASH — Donald Trump is vowing to upend the decades-old law limiting the ability of presidents to unilaterally withhold federal spending if he is elected to another term, setting up a potential constitutional clash with profound implications for the budget and basic workings of American government.

In a video reviewed by Semafor ahead of its release, Trump says he will attempt to bring a court challenge to overturn the Impoundment Control Act — a 1974 law that governs the process presidents must use to either delay outright cancel pots of government spending. In the video, Trump promises that he will “order every federal agency to begin identifying large chunks of their budgets that can be saved through efficiencies and waste reduction using Impoundment” on day one of his presidency, effectively claiming the right to slash the federal budget at will.

RELAUNCH — Nuestro PAC — the outside group launched in 2020 to build on the strength of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ robust Latino voter outreach operation — is relaunching for 2024 with plans to boost President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign to the tune of $37 million, The Messenger reports.

The scope of the Nuestro PAC investment includes bilingual digital outreach, mail, and radio programing targeting Latino voters in the battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.

OLYMPIC RAID — French financial police this morning searched the headquarters of the Paris 2024 Olympics as part of an investigation into the awarding of public contracts, write Zoé Courtois, Paul de Villepin, Océane Herrero and Nicolas Camut.

In an internal email to staff seen by POLITICO, the organizing committee said searches were carried out by “teams from the criminal police and the public prosecutor” who are “collecting documents.”

The prospect of potential corruption involving contracts could deliver a reputational knock to French President Emmanuel Macron, who has stressed to his ministers the importance of a successful Paris Olympics, which were awarded to the French capital in July 2017, a few months after he was first elected.

In March, Macron said the Paris Games’ goal should aim to “welcome the world in the best possible conditions of safety, organization, social and ecological responsibility.”

In a statement, Paris 2024 said: “A police search is currently underway at the headquarters of the Organising Committee. Paris 2024 is cooperating fully with the investigators to facilitate their investigations.”

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