The hundreds of thousands of bikers who attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally may have departed western South Dakota, but public health departments in multiple states are trying to measure how much and how quickly the coronavirus spread in bars, tattoo parlors and gatherings before people traveled home to nearly every state in the country.

From the city of Sturgis, which is conducting mass testing for its roughly 7,000 residents, to health departments in at least six states, health officials are trying to track outbreaks from the 10-day rally, which ended on Aug. 16. They face the task of tracking an invisible virus that spread among bar-hoppers and rally-goers, who then traveled to over half of the counties in the United States.

Read the rest of the story at The Los Angeles Times

Jerry Falwell Jr. has resigned from his role as president of Liberty University after 13 turbulent years at the helm of the prominent evangelical Christian school, he told the Wall Street Journal late Monday.

It follows a day of back-and-forth after Liberty University released a statement that said Falwell had offered his resignation and then withdrawn it.

“On the first day of classes of Liberty University’s fall term, Jerry Falwell, Jr., agreed to resign as its President and from its Board of Directors but following media reports about the resignation, withdrew it,” the statement said.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

A day after a police officer shot a Black man multiple times in the back, law enforcement deployed what appeared to be tear gas as protesters defied a curfew in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Multiple fires were burning at buildings in Kenosha lat Monday night, NBC affiliate WTMJ reported, but it was not clear how or when they started. Several parked vehicles not far from the courthouse were in flames about 11 p.m., according to video and an NBC crew at the scene.

Earlier in the day, Gov. Tony Evers authorized the National Guard to help local law enforcement respond to the protests.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

President Donald Trump announced Sunday his administration was providing an emergency authorization for the use of convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19, a treatment that more than 70,000 patients have already received.

One day prior to the start of the Republican National Convention, Trump made the announcement in an evening news conference. He said the authorization “will dramatically expand access to this treatment.”

“We’re years ahead of approvals if we went by the speed of past administrations,” Trump said, adding, “And that includes vaccines.”

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

A federal judge has rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to quash a subpoena for his tax returns as part of an investigation into hush payments to women who alleged affairs, which Trump long has denied.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, for eight years worth of the president’s personal and business tax returns.

Stephen Bannon, a former senior White House adviser to President Donald Trump, has been arrested and charged along with three other men with swindling donors who supported a private effort to build sections of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Bannon and the other men were indicted by a federal grand jury in New York on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering in connection with their roles in the non-profit group “We Build the Wall.”

Prosecutors allege that Bannon diverted $1 million raised by the group to another organization he controlled and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of donor funds on his personal expenses.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

President Donald Trump attacked former President Barack Obama on Wednesday, criticizing him for the message he delivered at the Democratic National Convention condemning his successor.

Trump appeared to be tuning into Obama’s address, tweeting “HE SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN, AND GOT CAUGHT!” as the former president began his speech — a message Joe Biden retweeted, with the addition of a line from Obama’s speech that “Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.”

As the speech continued, Trump again tweeted about his predecessor: “WHY DID HE REFUSE TO ENDORSE SLOW JOE UNTIL IT WAS ALL OVER, AND EVEN THEN WAS VERY LATE? WHY DID HE TRY TO GET HIM NOT TO RUN?”

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

President Donald Trump on Wednesday promoted a boycott of Goodyear, angrily reacting to a viral company policy that banned employees from wearing “MAGA Attire.”

“Don’t buy GOODYEAR TIRES – They announced a BAN ON MAGA HATS. Get better tires for far less!” Trump wrote on Twitter. “(This is what the Radical Left Democrats do. Two can play the same game, and we have to start playing it now!).”

The president appeared to reference an image that a Goodyear employee said was taken during a diversity training slideshow that went viral this week.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

The postmaster general announced Tuesday he will be halting the operational changes put in place to cut costs at the embattled U.S Postal Service until after the November election after he came growing under pressure to reverse the shifts due to mail delays.

Louis DeJoy, a Republican donor who assumed the role of postmaster general in June, said in a statement his initiatives would be suspended “to avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail.”

“The Postal Service is ready today to handle whatever volume of election mail it receives this fall,” he said. “Even with the challenges of keeping our employees and customers safe and healthy as they operate amid a pandemic, we will deliver the nation’s election mail on time and within our well-established service standards. The American public should know that this is our number one priority between now and election day.”

Read the rest of the story at CBS News

A new bipartisan report released by a Senate panel Tuesday outlines perhaps the most detailed accounting to date of Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election while accusing the White House and others close to President Donald Trump of refusing to cooperate with an investigation into whether the president’s campaign simply benefited or sought to aid Russia’s efforts.

The nearly-1,000 page report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, its fifth and final examination of a years-long effort to probe Russian meddling in 2016, describes several episodes in which Trump and members of his campaign were keen to accept Russia’s help — and in some instances goes further than even former special counsel Robert Mueller in detailing ties between the campaign and Russian individuals.

Read the rest of the story at ABC News

President Donald Trump denied Monday that he had done anything to slow mail delivery as accusations grow that he, as well as Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, have politicized the U.S. Postal Service and hamstrung the agency’s work. Meanwhile, DeJoy agreed to testify before Congress next week on the issue.

Trump told reporters Monday that he had “encouraged everybody to speed up the mail, not slow the mail,” but critics point to policy changes made by DeJoy, a close ally of the president and a Republican fundraiser, as the cause of the holdup.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

A group of Republicans addressed the Democratic National Convention on Monday night to urge Americans to vote against the “disappointing” and “disturbing” Republican President Donald Trump.

“Many of us have been deeply concerned about the current path we’ve been following for the past four years. It’s a path that’s led to division, dysfunction, irresponsibility and growing vitriol between our citizens,” former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, one of four Republicans to take the virtual stage at the convention, said, standing at what appeared to be a fork in the road. “Continuing to follow that path will have terrible consequences for America’s soul, because we’re being taken down the wrong road by a president who has pitted one against the other.”

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Kamala Harris is the only candidate on either major party ticket with a net favorability rating that is positive, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday.

The California senator, announced last week as Joe Biden’s running mate, was viewed favorably by 39 percent of those polled, as opposed to 35 percent who viewed her unfavorably. That net rating of plus 4 tops the ratings of Biden (minus 6), President Donald Trump (minus 12) and Vice President Mike Pence (minus 5).

Read the rest of the story at Politico

Former President Barack Obama condemned President Donald Trump in a new interview over his efforts to “actively kneecap” the United States Postal Service in order to frustrate mail-in voting ahead of the November election — casting the maneuvers by his White House successor as “unique to modern political history.”

The criticism from Obama came in response to Trump’s admission Thursday that he opposes additional funding for the federal agency and election security grants because those provisions would help facilitate voting by mail amid the global coronavirus pandemic.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

A legal adviser to President Trump’s reelection campaign is amplifying a false theory from a conservative law professor that Kamala Harris may not be eligible for the vice presidency due to questions surrounding the immigration status of her parents at the time she was born.

Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October, 20, 1964. Constitutional scholars and Supreme Court precedent have long held that anyone born in the U.S. is an American citizen, which makes them eligible for the presidency.

Jenna Ellis, the Trump campaign adviser, reposted a tweet Thursday from Tom Fitton, the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, in which he asked whether Harris is “ineligible to be Vice President under the U.S. Constitution’s ‘Citizenship Clause'” and shared an op-ed from John Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University, published in Newsweek.

Read the rest of the story at CBS News

President Donald Trump said Thursday he opposes funding for the U.S. Postal Service and election security grants in an effort to stymie mail-in voting for the upcoming presidential election.

Democrats “want 3½ billion dollars for something that will turn out to be fraudulent, that’s election money, basically. They want 3½ billion dollars for the mail-in votes, OK, universal mail-in ballots,” Trump told Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo, in response to a question on talks on the next coronavirus relief package. “They want 25 billion dollars — billion — for the Post Office.”

“Now they need that money in order to have the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” he continued. “By the way, those are just two items, but if they don’t get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting.”

Read the rest of the story at Politico

Joe Biden’s campaign raised $26 million in the 24 hours after he selected Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate — an eye-popping total that shows the campaign’s growing fundraising strength as the election draws nearer.

Biden announced the fundraising total during the ticket’s first virtual grassroots fundraiser on Wednesday evening, immediately following Biden and Harris’ first joint campaign event in Wilmington, Del.

The massive cash haul, which included 150,000 first-time donors, is a signal of Harris’ ability to generate enthusiasm for the campaign and the history-making moment of her selection, as the first woman of color named to a major party presidential ticket.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and 174 other Democrats in the chamber signed a letter sent Wednesday to the new Postmaster General demanding the agency reverses operational changes they argue would hamper mail-in voting on Nov. 3.

“It is always essential that the Postal Service be able to deliver mail in a timely and effective manner. During the once-in-a-century health and economic crisis of COVID-19, the Postal Service’s smooth functioning is a matter of life-or-death, and is critical for protecting lives, livelihoods and the life of our American Democracy,” the lawmakers wrote.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

President Donald Trump was abruptly escorted out of a White House press conference on Monday after shots were fired outside of the White House.

The suspect was taken to the hospital and no one else was injured, Trump said.

The Secret Service released a statement late Monday night that said a 51-year-old man approached an officer at a post on the White House perimeter and said he had a weapon. The suspect then “ran aggressively” toward the officer, pulled an object from his clothing and crouched into a “shooter’s stance” as if he was going to fire a weapon, the statement said.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Former Vice President Joe Biden is closing in on a final decision on his choice of a running mate, four sources familiar with the matter told NBC News, as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee huddled with family at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, this weekend.

The sources said Biden could announce a final decision by the middle of next week or sooner and stressed that while he has blown past several self-imposed deadlines, his only real deadline is the Democratic National Convention, which begins Aug. 17.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer traveled to Delaware last weekend for a private meeting with Biden, NBC News confirmed.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Top Democrats on Sunday criticized President Donald Trump’s executive actions on coronavirus relief as “absurdly unconstitutional” and “way off base.”

The measures, which Trump signed on Saturday and sidestep Congress after lawmakers failed to reach a deal on Friday, provide an additional $400 per week unemployment benefits among other relief measures such as a temporary payroll tax cut.

Trump said the federal government would fund most of the benefits with disaster relief money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He also called on states, many of which are already suffering from budget shortfalls due to the pandemic, to cover a quarter of the cost.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

President Donald Trump signed four executive actions Saturday for coronavirus economic relief, upendingnegotiations with Congress after lawmakers failed to reach a deal on Friday.

The executive actions defer payroll taxes through the end of the year for Americans earning less than $100,000 a year.

They also defer student loan payments through the end of the year; discourage evictions; and extend enhanced unemployment benefits that expired last week, but at a reduced level of $400 instead of the prior $600.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

President Donald Trump issued an executive order Thursday barring U.S. companies from doing business with ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok.

The order, which is set to go into effect in 45 days, would be a major blow to the popular short-form video app if it is not sold to a U.S. company. Microsoft has been in talks to buy TikTok’s U.S. operations and said last week that it would complete the discussions by Sept. 15.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

New York Attorney General Letitia James sued the National Rifle Association and four individuals, including its chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, on Thursday, seeking to dissolve the gun rights advocacy group and accusing top executives of “years of illegal self-dealings” that funded a “lavish lifestyle.”

James said the NRA, a not-for-profit organization, undercut its charitable mission by engaging in illegal financial conduct, including diverting millions of dollars “for personal use by senior leadership, awarding contracts to the financial gain of close associates and family, and appearing to dole out lucrative no-show contracts to former employees in order to buy their silence and continued loyalty.”

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Prosecutors in New York City have subpoenaed Deutsche Bank for records on President Donald Trump’s finances, The New York Times reports, and the bank has complied. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office issued the subpoena last year for financial records Trump’s businesses provided to the bank that may show evidence of fraud, according to the Times, indicating their probe is wider in scope than only the hush money payments Trump’s campaign paid to women who alleged they had affairs with him. The commander-in-chief and the German bank have had a relationship since the 1990s, and the financial institution has lent his company more than $2 billion. In court filings this week, the Manhattan lawyers said they were investigating possible bank and insurance fraud, referencing “public reports of possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization.”

Read the story at The Daily Beast.

Facebook and Twitter have sanctioned President Donald Trump for spreading misinformation on Covid-19 on Wednesday, including blocking his campaign from tweeting until it removed an offending post.

Both social media giants acted in response to a video clip posted to both Trump’s Facebook and campaign Twitter accounts where he claims children were “virtually immune” to Covid-19. Trump has been using the phrase recently as part of a drive to reopen schools. But both Facebook and Twitter considered the claim a breach of their guidelines on coronavirus misinformation.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

Vice President Mike Pence described Chief Justice John Roberts in a new interview as a “disappointment” to conservative voters, explicitly seeking to cast the Supreme Court as a campaign issue ahead of the November election.

“Look, we have great respect for the institution of the Supreme Court of the United States,” Pence told the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody on Wednesday. “But Chief Justice John Roberts has been a disappointment to conservatives — whether it be the Obamacare decision, or whether it be a spate of recent decisions all the way through Calvary Chapel.”

Read the rest of the story at Politico

Only 14 percent of voters said they would be more likely to take a coronavirus vaccine if President Donald Trump recommended it, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

Voters were far more likely to say they’d take a vaccine based on the advice of their family (46 percent), the CDC (43 percent) or the government’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci (43 percent). One-third said they would be more likely to get vaccinated if the World Health Organization encouraged Americans to do so.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

President Donald Trump suggested on Tuesday that a bomb attack was behind the catastrophic explosion that rocked Beirut earlier in the day, seemingly contradicting Lebanese officials’ explanations that it was caused by confiscated explosives.

The exact cause of the explosion was unclear Tuesday afternoon, but Abbas Ibrahim, chief of Lebanese General Security, said it was set off by explosive material that had been seized from a ship years ago, The Associated Press reported. The Lebanese interior minister also backed that explanation, saying the material was ammonium nitrate held in the port since 2014, Reuters reported.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday that U.S. officials are beginning to see early signs of a new coronavirus surge in some states.

The rate of coronavirus tests that come back positive in some states outside of the southern region of the nation is beginning to increase, Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association. It’s the same “insidious” rise that the Sun Belt region saw a month or so ago before cases surged, he said.

Read the rest of the story at CNBC.

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has made inroads among white voters in two Southern states, improving his chances in North Carolina and Georgia, according to a CBS News poll released Sunday.

The CBS News Battleground Tracker poll showed Biden leading President Donald Trump in North Carolina, 48 percent to 44, and edging Trump in Georgia by a single percentage point, 46 to 45.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

House Natural Resources Chair Rep. Raul Grijalva announced Saturday he tested positive for Covid-19, days after chairing a hearing in which Rep. Louie Gohmert participated at length.

Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who has represented a Tuscon-area seat since 2003, is 73 and a heavy smoker. He said in a statement he is without symptoms and in quarantine.

“While I cannot blame anyone directly for this, this week has shown that there are some Members of Congress who fail to take this crisis seriously,” he said in a statement. “Stopping the spread of a deadly virus should not be a partisan issue.”

Read the rest of the story at Politico

President Trump suggested delaying November’s election in a Thursday tweet, again claiming without evidence that mail-in voting will lead to widespread voter fraud.

The state of play: While this is the first time that Trump has actively floated changing Election Day, he does not have the power to do so. That lies exclusively with Congress, per a Washington Post breakdown of the issue.

Read the rest of the story at Axios.

Joe Biden on Wednesday excoriated President Donald Trump for promoting on Twitter the dubious claims of Dr. Stella Immanuel, the Houston doctor who’s claimed to have effectively treated hundreds of COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine, who the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee called a “crazy woman.”

In a virtual event with the UnidosUS Action Fund, a nonprofit advocating for Latino political power, Biden was asked to respond to Trump having repeatedly pushed for public schools to reopen this fall without putting into place effective measures to keep teachers and students safe.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, who has refused to wear a mask, tested positive for the coronavirus Wednesday shortly before he was expected to travel with President Donald Trump to Texas.

Gohmert, 66, one of the most outspokenly conservative members of Congress, said he tested positive during the routine screening at the White House prior to boarding Air Force One and blamed his infection on the fact that he had begun to wear a mask more frequently in recent days.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell introduced a new coronavirusrelief plan on the Senate floor after Senate Republican leaders and the White House appear to have overcome their differences.

“I hope this strong proposal will occasion a real response, not partisan cheap shots. Not the predictable, tired old rhetoric as though these were ordinary times, and the nation could afford ordinary politics,” McConnell said Monday afternoon in a floor speech.

Read the rest of the story at ABC News.

Rep. John Lewis, the “conscience of Congress” who represented Georgia for more than three decades, made his final trip to the U.S. Capitol on Monday, lying in state in the building where his former colleagues said farewell to the civil rights giant.

A military honor guard carried Lewis’ flag-draped casket up the stairs en route to the Capitol Rotunda, where the 80-year-old became the first Black lawmaker to lie in state.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

President Donald Trump continues to trail presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in battleground states he won in 2016, according to a new poll.

With just 100 days until Election Day, Trump is behind in Florida, Arizona and Michigan, according to a CNN-SSRS poll released Sunday.

Trump trails Biden by 51 percent to 46 percent in Florida; by 49 percent to 45 percent in Arizona; and by 52 percent to 40 percent in Michigan.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

Crowds watched solemnly Sunday as the body of Rep. John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge one final time, 55 years after the civil rights icon marched for peace and was met with brutality in Selma, Alabama.

Body bearers from the U.S. armed forces placed the late Georgia congressman and civil rights icon onto a horse-drawn caisson Sunday at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. From there, the public was allowed to line up to honor Lewis for about a half-mile to the foot of the bridge.

Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., thanked Lewis’ family during a ceremony at the chapel for sharing the congressman with the public for so many years.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will no longer hold a large, in-person Republican convention in Jacksonville, Florida, because of the coronavirus but that he will hold virtual events and still give an acceptance speech.

“I told my team it’s time to cancel the Jacksonville, Florida, component of the GOP convention. We will be starting in North Carolina for the Monday, as has always been planned. We were never taking that off,” Trump said at a news conference at the White House.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Even after tear gas choked downtown Portland in the early hours of Tuesday, Riots Ribs kept the food coming.

A volunteer, who has been camped outside the Multnomah County Justice Center since demonstrations against police brutality began more than 50 days ago, slathered barbecue sauce on the meat cooking just a few yards from federal forces trying to push back protesters.

Despite the surrounding chaos, the young woman in charge of Riot Ribs’ social media account took a moment to tweet.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Ghislaine Maxwell has been accused of child sex trafficking in connection with her late friend Jeffrey Epstein, a financier and convicted sex offender. The charges against her include recruiting and grooming girls as young as 14 into a circle of sexual abuse with possible connections to powerful men around the world.

President Donald Trump wishes her well.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

President Donald Trump is throwing a big wrench into negotiations between the White House and Senate Republicans over the next coronavirus relief bill by demanding a payroll tax cut be included and funding for testing be reduced or cut completely.

Leaving meetings on Capitol Hill Monday night, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said that the payroll tax cut is in the yet-to-be released bill despite Republican senators saying they don’t think it’s good policy.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden holds a double-digit lead nationally over President Donald Trump, with 7 in 10 voters saying the country is on the wrong track and majorities disapproving of the president’s handling of the coronavirus and race relations.

Those are the major findings of a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that comes 3½ months before the presidential election, amid a pandemic that has killed about 140,000 people in the U.S. and during protests and debates over race across the country.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has tested positive for coronavirus, he said Wednesday, as cases in his state hit record numbers just a month after his state hosted President Donald Trump’s first campaign rally amid the pandemic.

In a news conference he attended virtually, Stitt, a Republican, revealed that he had been getting tested for the virus periodically and most recently got tested Tuesday when the results came back positive.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale has been demoted, less than four weeks after an embarrassing, poorly attended Trump rally in Tulsa that Parscale had boasted beforehand could have up to one million in attendance.

On Trump’s Facebook account, the president announced on Wednesday that he is promoting deputy campaign manager Bill Stepien to run the 2020 campaign. Parscale, who had never been part of a political campaign before becoming digital media director for Trump’s 2016 effort, will return to that focus going forward for the re-election team.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite

Supreme Court Justice Ruther Ginsburg was admitted to The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore on Tuesday for treatment of a possible infection.

Ginsburg was initially evaluated at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C., on Monday night after experiencing fever and chills. She underwent an endoscopic procedure at Johns Hopkins on Tuesday afternoon to clean out a bile duct stent that was placed last August, the court said.

The 87-year-old justice is resting comfortably and will stay in the hospital for a few days to receive intravenous antibiotic treatment, according to the court.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

The federal government may not have the capacity to supply medical professionals with personal protective equipment amid the latest surge in coronavirus cases, according to internal administration documents obtained by NBC News.

For example, the Strategic National Stockpile and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have fewer than 900,000 gloves in reserve after shipping 82.7 million of them — or just 30 percent of the amount requested by state, local and tribal governments — since the COVID-19 crisis began, according to figures compiled Sunday by Health and Human Services Department officials for senior leaders of the interagency coronavirus task force effort.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

President Donald Trump insisted on Monday that he “personally” likes Dr. Anthony Fauci, as press secretary Kayleigh McEnany denied the White House was working to discredit the country’s leading infectious disease expert.

“I don’t always agree with him,” Trump said at a White House event. “We get along very well, I like him personally.”

The comments came a day after a White House official gave an opposition research-style memo to NBC News and other news outlets listing nearly a dozen past comments, some taken out of context, by Fauci that the official said had ultimately proven erroneous.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos defended the Trump administration’s aggressive push to reopen schools in the fall amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic, saying Sunday that a hybrid of virtual and in-person learning is “not a valid choice for families.”

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” DeVos also refused to saywhether the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines for schools should be followed uniformly.

“The CDC guidelines are just that, meant to be flexible and meant to be applied as appropriate for the situation,” she said.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump commuted the prison sentence of former campaign aide Roger Stone, former Department of Justice special counsel Robert S. Mueller III defended the investigation into Russian meddling and said Stone “remains a convicted felon, and rightfully so.”

Mueller, who led the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, pushed back against claims that the inquiry was a “witch hunt.” In an editorial published by the Washington Post, Mueller said he felt “compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper.”

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

A pandemic of the novel coronavirus has now killed more than 552,000 people worldwide.

Over 12.2 million people across the globe have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new respiratory virus, according to datacompiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The actual numbers are believed to be much higher due to testing shortages, many unreported cases and suspicions that some governments are hiding the scope of their nations’ outbreaks.

Read the rest of the story at ABC News.

President Donald Trump is facing broad disapproval for his management of the two major crises gripping the nation, with two-thirds of Americans giving him low marks for both his response to the coronavirus pandemic and his handling of race relations, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos pollreleased Friday.

Evaluation of Trump’s oversight of the COVID-19 crisis reached a new low since ABC News/Ipsos began surveying on the coronavirus in March, with 67% disapproving of his efforts. One-third of the country approves of the president’s oversight of the pandemic.

Read the rest of the story at ABC News.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the Trump administration’s broad rollback of Obamacare rules requiring employers to provide free birth control to women, in a major victory for religious groups allied with President Donald Trump.

The Supreme Court, in its 7-2 ruling, sought to resolve a long-running legal battle that previously vexed the justices — how to strike the right balance between ensuring access to birth control and safeguarding religious freedom protections. But the court’s decision appears likely to revive debate over the culture war issue as the presidential election kicks into gear.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

President Trump demanded on Tuesday that schools reopen physically in the fall, pressing his drive to get the country moving again even as the coronavirus pandemic surged through much of the United States and threatened to overwhelm some health care facilities.

In a daylong series of conference calls and public events at the White House, the president, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and other senior officials opened a concerted campaign to lean on governors, mayors and others to resume classes in person months after more than 50 million children were abruptly ejected from school buildings in March.

Read the rest of the story at The New York Times.

Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, who is reportedly on Joe Biden’s vice presidential short list, said on Monday that she had tested positive for coronavirus.

“COVID-19 has literally hit home,” she wrote on Twitter. “I have had NO symptoms and have tested positive.”

In an MSNBC interview on Monday, Bottoms said that she got tested because her husband had been sleeping more than usual — sometimes a symptom of having the coronavirus — and that the positive result was a “shock.”

Read the rest of the story at Politico.

Billionaire property developer Joe Farrell, a prominent Republican fundraiser, received up to $1 million in taxpayer coronavirus relief funds, according to federal data released Monday.

Other players in the world of celebrity and influence who took advantage of loans under the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP,to help struggling small businesses hurt by coronavirus shutdowns included Kanye West’s $3 billion clothing and sneaker company, multimillionaire pop artist Jeff Koons and the Church of Scientology, which is reported to be worth at least $1 billion.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

As recently as one month ago, Donald Trump was merely losing. Now he is flailing, trudging into the Independence Day weekend at the nadir of his presidency, trailing by double digits in recent polls and in danger of dragging the Republican Senate down with him.

But there are still four months before the election — and any number of ways for Biden to blow it.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

Prosecutors have asked a judge to schedule a Friday court appearance in New York for Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend and longtime associate of the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell was arrested on Thursday on U.S. charges of luring underage girls so that Epstein could sexually abuse them.

Read the rest of the story at CNBC

Congressional officials and White House aides are preparing for the possibility Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, 72, will retire before the 2020 election, according to a Wednesday report, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) already has a replacement in mind.

Aides to President Donald Trump view Thomas “as the most likely” justice to retire this year, according to the report in The Washington Post. One outside adviser to Trump suggested McConnell favors 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Amul Thapar to replace Thomas, saying, “If Thomas goes, you’ve got a lot of people around this process ready to support Thapar — and McConnell ready to move his favorite through.”

Brett Giroir, the coronavirus testing czar, said Wednesday that the United States’ coronavirus testing capacity is at risk of being overwhelmed in some states by a surge in new infections and increased surveillance efforts in nursing homes and jails.

“It is absolutely correct that some labs across the country are reaching or near capacity,” Giroir said. “Recent data from several states indicate rising infections and now an uptick in hospitalizations and death, even as other states and the great majority of counties are maintaining a low infection burden.”

White House Coronavirus Task Force member Dr. Anthony Fauci told Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on Tuesday that the final coronavirus death toll will be “very disturbing,” before predicting up to 100,000 new cases a day “if this does not turn around.”

“We’ve already seen 126,000 deaths with infection rates rising rapidly. Dr. Fauci, based on what you are seeing now, how many Covid-19 deaths and infections should America expect before this is all over?” asked Warren during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on the pandemic, prompting Dr. Fauci to reply, “I can’t make an accurate prediction, but it is going to be disturbing, I guarantee you that.”

In a speech in Wilmington, Delaware, the former vice president recounted what he cast as Trump’s missteps, from Trump’s early dismissals of the virus to his more recent refusals to wear a mask in public appearances.

Pointing to Trump in March declaring himself a wartime president in battling the coronavirus, Biden said: “What happened? Now it’s almost July, and it seems like our wartime president has surrendered — waved the white flag and left the battlefield.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany opened Tuesday’s White House briefing with a defense of President Donald Trump’s refusal to read the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) — and his claims that he wasn’t aware Russia had put bounties out for Taliban-linked militants to kill American troops.

“The president does read, and also he consumes intelligence verbally. This president, I will tell you, is the most informed person on planet Earth when it comes to the threats we face,” McEnany said. “You have Ambassador O’Brien, who sees him in person twice a day, who sometimes takes upwards of half a dozen calls with this president. He’s constantly being informed and briefed on intelligence matters.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) endorsed face coverings on Monday, a position contrary to the apparent instincts of many House Republicans and President Donald Trump.

 

“We must have no stigma — none — about wearing masks when we leave our homes and come near other people,” McConnell said in a speech to the Senate. “Wearing simple face coverings is not about protecting ourselves. It is about protecting everyone we encounter.” He added Americans should be “happy” to take “small steps” that ensure the country can “remain on offense” against the coronavirus.

Citing the rapid pace of coronavirus spread in some parts of California, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered seven counties including Los Angeles on Sunday to immediately close any bars and nightspots that are open and recommended eight other counties take action on their own to close those businesses.

The order shuts down any bar, brewery or pub that sells alcoholic drinks without serving food at the same time. Those that sell food will either be subject to the stricter dine-in rules or asked to focus on takeout and patio service.

The decision was announced in a statement issued by the governor’s state public health director, Dr. Sonia Angell. Bars in seven counties are immediately affected by the state order: Los Angeles, Fresno, Kern, San Joaquin, Tulare, Kings and Imperial.

President Donald Trump on Sunday denied that U.S. intelligence officials had briefed him about an alleged plot by Russian operatives to pay Taliban-linked militants in Afghanistan to kill American troops.

 

“Nobody briefed me or told me, [Vice President] Pence, or Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians,” Trump tweeted.

 

The president accused The New York Times of using a fake “anonymous source” to report the alleged briefing. In fact, the Times report cited multiple officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. It’s not uncommon for news outlets to grant anonymity to sources who aren’t authorized to speak publicly about information that may be newsworthy.

 

“Everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on us,” Trump tweeted. He added of the Times report: “Who is their ‘source’?”

The House approved a police reform bill proposed by Democrats on Thursday night, after Senate Democrats blocked a more modest proposal from moving forward in the Senate a day earlier. The bill passed with a vote of 236 to 181, with three Republicans — Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Will Hurd and Fred Upton — joining the Democrats to vote in favor. 

“This year in Congress, the only way we can ensure that a policing reform bill is signed into law is by coming to the table with all parties, in good faith, to finally end this injustice,” Fitzpatrick, a representative from Pennsylvania, said in a statement. The bill will now go to the Senate, where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said it will not pass the Republican-held chamber. 

Read the rest of the story at CBS News.

In one of his sharpest rebukes of President Donald Trump to date, former Vice President Joe Biden lambasted the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, comparing Trump to a whining child.

“(Trump’s) like a child who can’t believe this has happened to him — all his whining and self pity. This pandemic didn’t happen to him. It happened to all of us. And his job isn’t to whine about it, his job is to do something about it — to lead,” Biden said in a speech in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on Thursday.

A federal prosecutor offered lawmakers on Wednesday a roadmap to investigate alleged political interference in the sentencing of longtime Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone.

Aaron Zelinsky, one of four lead prosecutors in the Stone case, told the House Judiciary Committee that senior officials — including the head of the Justice Department’s public corruption unit — freely discussed concerns that they were being pressured to go easy on Stone during sentencing.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

The Kentucky Senate Democratic primary race to determine who takes on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in November is too close to call, NBC News projects.

Amy McGrath, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel, had a slight edge in a tougher-than-expected challenge from state Rep. Charles Booker. With 10 percent of the vote in by Wednesday morning, McGrath led Booker, 44 percent to 39.6 percent, a margin of just over 2,000 votes. But that tally includes only ones cast in person at the polls Tuesday; none of the substantial number of mail-in ballots that could determine the outcome have been counted and will not be for days.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Coronavirus hospitalizations in Arizona and Texas have hit record numbers as cases continue to surge in states in the South and the West, overwhelming medical professionals.

Arizona reported a record high of 3,591 new cases Tuesday, with nearly 60,000 known cases in the state overall. The swell in cases comes as President Donald Trump is set to hold a rally at a Phoenix megachurch Tuesday.

There was a surge in the number of inpatient beds occupied by positive or suspected COVID-19 patients, with 2,136 beds occupied, compared to 1,992 Sunday, according to data from the state’s Department of Health Services.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Four top U.S. public health officials and members of Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force said on Tuesday that he has not asked them to slow down testing for the virus after the president suggested at a rally that it was a “double-edged sword.”

Testifying before the House Energy & Commerce Committee, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, and the Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Brett Giroir all said that the president had not asked them to slow down the testing.

Read the rest of the story at HuffPost.

The United States saw a 25% increase in new cases of COVID-19 in the week ended June 21 compared to the previous seven days, with Arizona, Florida and Texas experiencing record surges in new infections, a Reuters analysis found.

Twenty-five U.S. states reported more new cases last week than the previous week, including 10 states that saw weekly new infections rise more than 50%, and 12 states that posted new records, according to the analysis of data from The COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-run effort to track the outbreak.

Read the rest of the story at HuffPost.

A noose was found in the garage stall of Black driver Bubba Wallace at the NASCAR race in Alabama on Sunday, less than two weeks after he successfully pushed the auto racing series to ban the Confederate flag at its tracks and facilities.

NASCAR announced the discovery late Sunday and said it had launched an immediate investigation. It said it will do everything possible to find who was responsible and “eliminate them from the sport.”

Read the rest of the story at Politico

President Trump’s campaign promised huge crowds at his rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday, but it failed to deliver. Hundreds of teenage TikTok users and K-pop fans say they’re at least partially responsible.

TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After @TeamTrump tweeted asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Attorney General William Barr said Saturday that at his request, President Donald Trump had fired Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan.

Shortly afterwards, Berman, who had defied Barr’s earlier demand for his resignation, announced that he would not resist the order and would step down, leaving the high-profile prosecutor’s office in the hands of his deputy, Audrey Strauss.

Trump himself, when asked about Berman’s firing Saturday afternoon by reporters at the White House, said he was “not involved” in the situation and that the decision was “up to the attorney general.”

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Six members of President Donald Trump’s campaign staff who are in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to set up for the president’s first campaign rally in months have tested positive for the coronavirus, the campaign announced Saturday.

The president’s campaign said they had performed hundreds of tests before the rally, his first since March 2, and Tim Murtaugh, the campaign communications director, said six members of the advance team tested positive and were immediately quarantined.

“No COVID-positive staffers or anyone in immediate contact will be at today’s rally or near attendees and elected officials,” Murtaugh said in a statement.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

An ABC News analysis found that hospitalizations for COVID-19 are increasing in 17 states across the country, with experts warning that the U.S. is by no means out of the first wave.

The states that saw the increases were Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Vermont, according to the analysis of state-released data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project.

Read the rest of the story at ABC News.

One of the three police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, is being fired, Mayor Greg Fischer announced Friday.

The chief of the Louisville Metro Police Department, Rob Schroeder, is initiating termination procedures against the officer, Brett Hankison, the mayor said in a statement.

It is the first significant action taken against an officer in a case that has drawn widespread criticism and national protests. Two other officers are on administrative reassignment while the shooting is investigated.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

The Oklahoma State Supreme Court will hear a lawsuit appeal to enforce safety measures at President Donald Trump’s rally on Saturday.

Tulsa attorney Clark Brewster will make a court appearance before the Oklahoma Supreme Court on Thursday by phone at 3 p.m., according to court records.

Earlier this week, a judge denied a lawsuit from the Tulsa law firm to enforce masks and social distancing at President Trump’s rally.

Read the rest of the story at KJRH-Tulsa.

President Donald Trump is trailing his Democratic rival Joe Biden by the widest margin this year, according to a Fox News poll released Thursday.

The poll, conducted from June 13 to 16, found 50 percent of respondents would vote for Biden, compared to 38 for Trump. That’s a sharp change from last month’s poll, which found 48 percent backing Biden and 40 percent backing Trump.

The poll was conducted amid weeks of protests over race and police brutality, a period where Trump attempted to establish himself as a “law and order” president and threatened federal force to quell demonstrators.

Read the rest of the story at Politico.

Read the rest of the story at HuffPost.

The former Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooksin the parking lot of a Wendy’s restaurant has been charged with felony murder, the district attorney’s office announced Wednesday.

The man, Garrett Rolfe, who was fired by the Atlanta Police Department after the June 12 shooting, faces 11 total counts, Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard said at a news conference.

A second officer, Devin Brosnan, was placed on administrative leave. Brosnan, who is a cooperating witness for the state, faces three charges, including aggravated assault and violation of oath.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, says in his new book that the House in its impeachment inquiry should have investigated President Trump not just for pressuring Ukraine to incriminate his domestic foes but for a variety of instances when he sought to intervene in law enforcement matters for political reasons.

Mr. Bolton describes several episodes where the president expressed willingness to halt criminal investigations “to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked,” citing cases involving major firms in China and Turkey. “The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn’t accept,” Mr. Bolton writes, adding that he reported his concerns to Attorney General William P. Barr.

Read the rest of the story at The New York Times.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on policing Tuesday amid increasing pressure and nationwide protests over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and other Black people in custody or at the hands of law enforcement officers.

“Today is about pursuing common sense and fighting, fighting for a cause like we seldom get the chance to fight for,” Trump said. “We have to find common ground.”

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday rebuffed Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s calls for nearly a dozen Confederate statues to be removed from the Capitol, saying it was an attempt to “airbrush” history.

“What I do think is clearly a bridge too far is this nonsense that we need to airbrush the Capitol and scrub out everybody from years ago who had any connection to slavery,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters, noting that a handful of former American presidents owned slaves.

Read the rest of the story at Politico