Welcome back to The Best & the Brightest, your new favorite political digest from myself, Tina Nguyen, Peter Hamby, and Julia Ioffe.

Speaking of which: Julia has a must-read update on the fate of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen, who was just arrested in Russia on espionage charges. You can read that story here.

In tonight’s email, the inside story of the Glenn Youngkin-Jeff Roe separation, an anti-Pritzker whisper campaign, and Mike Pompeo’s spirit walk in Abruzzo. But first…

• Trump Grand Jury Shocker: Just when we all thought D.A. Alvin Bragg might be dragging his feet on the Trump-Stormy Daniels investigation, perhaps waiting on Georgia to make the first move, his Manhattan grand jury has returned a felony indictment. Sure, it’s become politically unsavory for the largely silent Democratic leaders, but it looks like they’ll now have to make a choice on whether to back up Bragg. Because we know there will be chaos that Trump will surely whip up. Also, will Trump get another boost in campaign cash, or was his lackluster fundraising from his pre-indictment announcement a sign that small-dollar donors are temporarily tapped out? Meanwhile, the action shifts to Florida: How will Ron DeSantis react if he’s asked to help facilitate—in a typically perfunctory, administrative role—Trump’s extradition to New York? Or will the former president, who is due in Manhattan regardless to face E. Jean Carroll for an April 25 defamation trial, surrender willingly, like his lawyers suggested, and put on a show?

• Take Your Girlfriend to Work Day: Cory Booker has long been one of Washington’s most eligible bachelors, a status symbol that confers its own perks but also causes some political problems every four years or so. Presidents, after all, tend to be married men, for better or worse. This might partly explain why Booker flaunted his then-girlfriend Rosario Dawson when he was running for the Oval in 2019. And it’s why political insiders are paying attention now as Booker introduces his new girlfriend, the beautiful Harvard professor Sarah Lewis, around town.

  There was a conspicuous Playbook item last week about Booker showing Lewis off to some of the biggest names in Democratic politics, like the Clintons and Raphael Warnock, at journalist and mega-connector Holly Peterson’s home. Lewis was also seen yesterday on Capitol Hill, where her chic style stood out among the sea of polyester blends and midwestern beauty counter makeup.

  The timing is certainly interesting. I’ve been hearing that operatives and donors are encouraging Booker to run if Biden ends up deciding to retire. The New Jersey senator is being convinced that he shouldn’t stand aside for Kamala Harris, as he has privately pledged in the past, if there’s a primary. In the meantime, Booker is still fundraising, with frequent trips to California, and his social media posts have returned to his preferred inspirational, face-to-camera, guru-style format. Maybe he’s heeding the advice.

• Billions on the Hill: Bill Gates was spotted Wednesday on the Hill, looking very inconspicuous as he endured the metal detectors at the Constitution Avenue entrance with two young aides. He wasn’t the only billionaire in Congress that day. Starbucks founder and C.E.O. Howard Schultz, who slipped past security through the Senate committee entrance, received a grilling from the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee for Starbucks’ alleged union-busting practices. Mitt Romney, a former C.E.O. who abstains from coffee because of his LDS faith, seemed to be about the only senator defending Schultz.

  The chatter on the Hill was that Covington & Burling, the august law firm that prepped Schultz for the hearing, disserviced him by stiff-arming the committee and suggesting that A.J. Jones II, Starbucks’ chief public affairs officer, testify instead. The Covington-drafted letter to committee member Bernie Sanders conspicuously noted that Jones, a Clyburn alum, is Black. I’m told that committee members felt that the letter subtly admonished them as making a race-based decision in not accepting his testimony.

  It’s unlikely that race played a role here. Everyone knows that these senators want a star defendant at the table for their brow-beatings and tongue-lashings. It was Sanders who seemed to take the most offense to this assertion, even giving a perjury warning to Schultz. “Never communicate by letters implying racism,” one Hill veteran noted to me. “It was a Hail Mary tactic to get Schultz out of testifying and it backfired.”

And yet, I’ve since learned, Youngkin hasn’t given up on the dream of running and has signaled to top supporters and donors that Roe’s semi-betrayal has not impacted his thinking. In fact, in the love-hate relationship between the two men, it was Youngkin who told Roe to go, rather than commit to running on Roe’s timeline. As I have reported before, the former co-C.E.O. of Carlyle wants to preserve his optionality, as they say in finance, and he believes his best strategy is a late entry into the race, after either: 1) DeSantis fizzles, or 2) Trump and DeSantis effectively mutilate one another so thoroughly that they create a lane for a third option.

In the meantime, Youngkin has told people close to him that he needs a success story to tell on the stump from his brief two-year career in politics. In addition to heralding his C.R.T.-piñata-ing and soccer-mom-scaring keep-it-out-of-the-classroom schtick, in which he turned non-issues into made-for-the-right wedges, Younkgin wants to truly turn Virginia red by flipping the state legislature during the midterms this November. By then, of course, he’ll have missed various deadlines to get on state primary ballots. Some say by delaying his decision, he’s already made it.

Youngkin, who made his fortune through risk calculation, seems to have gamed out a subtle sea change in the looming election. The handful of top donors, who have already publicly supported and donated to DeSantis, like Ken Griffin and Steve Schwarzman, aren’t exactly loyal to him. In fact, I’ve heard from sources close to both men that they fully accept that they may have to back another horse later on if DeSantis doesn’t make it through the race. For them, this is all about getting a candidate who is not Trump, no matter how much it costs. Griffin, who has already dropped $5 million on DeSantis, told Politico back in November that he’s not even sure if DeSantis is running, but made it clear that he’s tired of Trump. A Youngkin spokesperson declined to comment.

These same donors are also starting to worry not only about DeSantis’ softening poll numbers (a new Quinnipiac poll shows Trump leading him by 14 points), but also his oscillation on Ukraine and general insincerity. There’s another concern, too: the notion that DeSantis, in an effort to out-MAGA Trump, is going to pull too far to the right in the primary and suffer the consequences in the general election. To wit, many in the consultant-donor class are scratching their heads about DeSantis’ support for a law making abortion illegal in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy. Donors fear that passing this bill is a gift to Democrats, who will be sure to make 2024 another referendum on Roe, a strategy that proved powerful during the midterms. This would provide Democrats a key advantage in courting a demographic that helps decide national elections: college educated, swing-voting, suburban women.

Rick Scott, DeSantis’s predecessor and rival, also saw this as political suicide and came out against the bill. I’m on a reporting trip in Florida right now, and I’ve been checking the temperatures of the state’s top G.O.P. leaders on the issue. There are a few schools of thought. One suggests that DeSantis just has to do whatever is possible to close the gap with Trump in the primary and then operate as necessary in the general. And that this maneuver will further endear him to evangelicals who have turned on Trump after he blamed them (among many others) for losing the midterms. There’s also a hope that any mistakes made over the abortion issue will be papered over by DeSantis’s culture warrior, parental-rights jihad, which is intended to assuage the fears of Republican soccer moms.

But general fears persist that the current Florida legislative session, which was intended to be DeSantis’ springboard toward ’24, is just going to be one big complexifier. There’s another permitless open-carry bill that’s coming down the pike of Florida’s red-meat MAGA legislature. That too would not play well with women in a general election.

This internal debate is all unfolding while DeSantis continues to drop in the polls while being roughed up by Trump. There’s a question about whether he can truly wait until June to announce his candidacy if he’s not able to actually hit back at Trump effectively from his perch in Tallahassee, even if he has seven media markets covering his every move. How many more weeks can DeSantis dodge and deflect?

In the meantime, top G.O.P. officials in Florida are sweating over who to support: Trump or DeSantis. I get the feeling that their heart says DeSantis, but their gut says he won’t survive against Trump. Lucky for them, they’ll have a few more weeks to make their calculation. But the whisper campaign that DeSantis should stand down until 2028 is already starting to grow louder. Things are frantic in Tallahassee. One example: after DeSantis blew off Megyn Kelly, there are even quiet conversations in the concentric circles around him wondering whether he needs to open himself more to national media. It’s one of many questions that Roe, and the many other highly-compensated consultants circling the putative candidate, are being paid handsomely to consider.

Is this sort of toilet-mandering really the message we want for the Democratic party?, these people ask? Well, I’m not sure that anyone outside of Washington really cares about, or even remembers, anything or anyone at these conventions other than the keynote speaker and the nominee. But, at the very least, these sharp knives suggest that Chicago must really be leading the race. And the longer that Biden waits to make a decision, the more mudslinging will ensue.

But what’s the rush? Perhaps Biden and the other shadow 2024 hopefuls don’t mind a little shivving of Pritzker, who has been looking at a presidential run himself, if Biden steps down.

Well, it turns out Pompeo was in his ancestral homeland of Pacentro, in Abruzzo, Italy—a place he frequented while serving as Secretary of State for “times of reflection,” aides tell me. (Apparently, Madonna is also from this region.) He seems to have been reflecting on his presidential odds, too. A few sources close to Pompeo have been telling me that he’s no longer inclined to seek the Oval. He’s even been conveying that he’s worried about his security—that perhaps the Iranians could somehow take him out while he’s counting calories at the Iowa State Fair—but all this seems a little far-fetched. More likely he’s fretting about his single-digit polling, and the fact that the hawkish lane is being hogged up by Nikki Haley and also maybe Mike Pence. It surely doesn’t help that his book tour was a bust.

However, I did hear from someone this week familiar with Pompeo’s thinking that he hasn’t completely made up his mind, and that he’s been interviewing potential field staff in Iowa and New Hampshire. We’ll soon find out when Pompeo emerges from his soul searching and decides to throw his hat in the ring.