Kamala Harris endorsed Joe Biden on Sunday and said she would “do everything in my power’’ to help elect him, becoming the latest dropout from the Democratic race for president to line up behind the former vice president in his battle with Bernie Sanders for the nomination.

The decision by the California senator who was one of three black candidates seeking to challenge President Donald Trump further solidifies the Democratic establishment’s move to close circles around Biden after his Super Tuesday success. Her endorsements comes before the next round of primaries, with six states voting Tuesday, including Michigan.

Read the rest of the story at The Los Angeles Times

Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor who jumped into the 2020 presidential race late and spent over $500 million on an unorthodox campaign, ended his bid for the Democratic nomination on Wednesday, but vowed to stay in the fight in an attempt to defeat President Donald Trump in November.

“After yesterday’s results, the delegate math has become virtually impossible — and a viable path to the nomination no longer exists,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “But I remain clear-eyed about my overriding objective: victory in November. Not for me, but for our country. And so while I will not be the nominee, I will not walk away from the most important political fight of my life.”

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Eight months from a general election, President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers are considering an urgent effort to rescue the U.S. economy from a coronavirus panic.

Trump advisers and GOP lawmakers have spent the past few days pushing the White House to develop a package of economic stimulus measures, designed to prop up the economy amid growing fears about the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

Mike Bloomberg won his first contest, carrying the American Samoa Democratic caucuses and winning at least four delegates on Super Tuesday, NBC News projected.

Bloomberg won 49.9 percent of the vote, or 175 votes. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, who was born in American Samoa, received 29.3 percent, or 103 votes, and earned one delegate with 99 percent in. One of American Samoa’s six delegates has yet to be awarded.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Monday will lay out a detailed plan for swift federal action to combat the coronavirus outbreak.

The proposed initiative, which Warren’s presidential campaign shared with HuffPost on Sunday evening, is not another item on Warren’s agenda for what she would do if she becomes president. 

It is, instead, a list of steps that she would like to see Congress and President Donald Trump take right now, in order to contain the outbreak, to help those affected by it, and to stop the economy from falling into a recession.

Read the rest of the story at HuffPost

Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg plans to endorse former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the Democratic presidential race, according to a person informed of the decision, as the Democratic Party’s moderate wing quickly began coalescing around Mr. Biden in an effort to stop Senator Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination.

Mr. Buttigieg’s endorsement, which is set to come at a Biden campaign event Monday night in Dallas, follows the news that another moderate candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, was quitting the race and throwing her support to Mr. Biden. She also plans to back Mr. Biden at the Dallas event. Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader, was also among those who endorsed Mr. Biden on Monday.

Read the rest of the story at The New York Times

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) dropped her presidential bid Monday, an aide told HuffPost.
Klobuchar is set to endorse former Vice President Joe Biden at an event in Dallas on Monday night, The Associated Press reports.

Her decision comes after a poor showing in the South Carolina primary. She picked up just 3% of the vote, flailing in comparison to her fellow moderate Biden, who walked away with 48%.

Read the rest of the story at HuffPost.

Pete Buttigieg, the former small-city Indiana mayor and first openly gay major presidential candidate, said Sunday night he was dropping out of the Democratic race, following a crushing loss in the South Carolina primary where his poor performance with black Democrats signaled an inability to build a broad coalition of voters.

The decision comes just 48 hours before the biggest voting day of the primary, Super Tuesday, when 15 states and territories will allot about one-third of the delegates over all. The results were widely expected to show him far behind Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders.

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

Tom Steyer, the California activist billionaire who has largely been a nonfactor in the Democratic primary campaign, dropped out of the race on Saturday night.

Steyer’s departure came after a disappointing finish in the South Carolina Democratic primary. With 70 percent of the vote in, Steyer had just 11.5 percent of the vote — despite spending millions of dollars on campaigning there.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Joe Biden got the resounding victory his struggling campaign needed in South Carolina on Saturday night, buoyed by strong support from black voters, according to an NBC News projection.

“Just days ago, the press and the pundits had declared this candidacy dead,” Biden told supporters. “Now, thanks to all of you, the heart of the Democratic Party, we’ve just won and we’ve won big because of you. We are very much alive!”

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

The politicization of the coronavirus continues to spread faster than the potential pandemic itself.

President Donald Trump called out “Do Nothing Democrats” for ostensibly saying that the new virus is “the fault of ‘Trump’” while at the same time taking credit for how slow it has spread in the United States. Weird flex, but okay.

In a very early Friday morning tweet that referred to himself in the third person twice, Trump took a curious victory lap for an outbreak that is still growing and has led to the worst week in the stock market since 2008. 

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

Wall Street fell sharply on Thursday for the sixth straight day, with all three major indices entering correction as investor fears multiplied that the coronavirus epidemic could spread to the U.S.

A correction indicates a drop of 10 percent from the 52-week high.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq all plunged at the opening bell, with the Dow falling more than 500 points for a loss of 2 percent. The S&P tumbled by 2.1 percent and the Nasdaq fell by 2.7 percent, marking the worst week for stocks since the financial crisis.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Former President Barack Obama is demanding that a pro-Trump group stop airing a “despicable” ad that uses a recording of Obama’s voice to attack former Vice President Joe Biden — a rare intervention in a race that Obama has largely avoided so far.

“[T]his despicable ad is straight out of the Republican disinformation playbook, and it’s clearly designed to suppress turnout among minority voters in South Carolina by taking President Obama’s voice out of context and twisting his words to mislead viewers,” Katie Hill, Obama’s communications director, told NBC News.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Five people were killed after an employee opened fire at the Molson Coors headquarters in Milwaukee on Wednesday, police said.

Milwaukee police said they responded to reports of a shooting in the area just after 2 p.m. and found the gunman, a 51-year-old Milwaukee man, dead of what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Authorities also found five employees of the “old Miller brewery” who had been killed in the attack, Police Chief Alfonso Morales said.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

A federal judge swung back at President Donald Trump on Tuesday over his heated criticism of the Roger Stone case, warning that the president’s commentary about his longtime associate’s conviction had helped fuel threats to the jury.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson cited Trump’s public comments and Twitter posts, as well as an accompanying campaign from the president’s conservative media allies to identify and critique the jury, as one of the reasons for her decision to clamp down on public access to a hearing on Stone’s request for a new trial.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

President Trump says Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor should recuse themselves from any Supreme Court cases involving him or his administration. Mr. Trump said at a press conference Tuesday in India that he thinks both judges have said terrible things about him.

The president first made the suggestion on Twitter, citing a Fox News segment about Sotomayor saying the majority-conservative court gives relief too quickly to the federal government. Mr. Trump has long harbored frustrations about Ginsburg, who in 2016 called the candidate a “faker.” Sotomayor authored a dissent in a 5-4 decision allowing the administration’s rule restricting public benefits for immigrants, saying the highest court has been too quick to grant “emergency” relief to the federal government. 

Read the rest of the story at CBS News

Wall Street plunged Monday after a spike in the number of reported cases of coronavirus fueled fears that the epidemic would have a serious impact on global economic growth.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted by 1,003 points in midday trading Monday, after a volatile session that saw the blue-chip index lose 979 points at the opening bell, erasing all gains for the year. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell by 4 percent, with the S&P 500 dropping 3.2 percent.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of rape and a felony sex crime Monday, marking a climactic end to a high-profile case that in some ways serves as vindication of the #MeToo movement.

Those two counts were connected to individual allegations made by Mimi Haley, a former Weinstein Co. production assistant, and Jessica Mann, a once-aspiring actress. Weinstein was acquitted on the two most serious charges of predatory sexual assault, which each carried a potential life sentence.

Read the rest of the story at The Los Angeles Times.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, who wields enormous influence in his home state of South Carolina, is planning to endorse Joe Biden on Wednesday, multiple sources with knowledge of the Democrat’s plans told POLITICO.

The planned endorsement is expected three days ahead of the state’s Saturday primary, giving Biden an important boost in a state that will likely determine the fate of his candidacy. Clyburn, the highest ranking African American in Congress, has long been close with Biden and has been open about his affinity for the former vice president during the Democratic primary.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton threw cold water on the impact of his own potential testimony in the Senate trial of President Donald Trump, telling an audience that it “would have made no difference to the ultimate outcome.”

Bolton, who was infamously not called to testify before the Senate, has come under increasing fire of late after continuing to play coy about what he knows about Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine. Instead of speaking out publicly, Bolton has repeatedly teased cryptic hints from his forthcoming book about his time in the White House, and been pilloried for what is seen as a craven attempt to sell more copies.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite

A federal judge on Thursday sentenced Roger Stone, President Trump’s longtime friend, to serve three years and four months in prison for impeding a congressional investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The penalty from U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson comes after weeks of infighting over the politically charged case that threw the Justice Department into crisis, and it is likely not to be the final word. Even before the sentencing hearing began, Trump seemed to suggest on Twitter he might pardon Stone. With the proceedings ongoing, Trump questioned whether his ally was being treated fairly.

Read the rest of the story at The Washington Post.

Two passengers from a cruise ship quarantined in Japanese waters have died from the novel coronavirus, officials said.

It’s the first deaths to occur out of the hundreds of confirmed cases from the Diamond Princess cruise ship.

The deceased patients — a man and a woman — were in their 80s and were residents of Japan. Both were taken ashore for treatment last week after having prolonged fevers, and they ultimately tested positive for the newly identified virus, known officially as COVID-19. They both died Thursday, according to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, which is leading and coordinating the public health response on board the cruise ship.

Read the rest of the story at ABC News.

Republican strategist Roger Stone, a close friend of President Trump, will be sentenced Thursday despite his ongoing efforts to overturn the guilty verdicts against him, a federal judge in Washington federal court ruled.
“There’s been a lot of work that’s gone into the sentencing,” U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said Tuesday. “It makes sense to proceed.”
Jackson said that “execution of the sentence will be deferred” while she decides whether Stone deserves a new trial.

Read the rest of the story at The Washington Post

President Trump granted clemency to a slew of high-profile individuals Tuesday, including Rod R. Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who was convicted on corruption charges in 2011 related to trying to sell then-President Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat, and Bernie Kerik, the former New York police commissioner jailed on eight felony charges, including tax fraud.

Trump is also planning to grant clemency to Michael Milken, who was charged with insider trading in the 1980s, according to a senior administration official.

Read the rest of the story at The Washington Post

Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg on Tuesday qualified for his first appearance in a Democratic presidential primary debate.

The billionaire media mogul received 19 percent of support from an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, allowing him to join the stage at the Feb. 19 debate in Las Vegas.

Candidates need four national polls showing 10 percent or higher support or 12 percent or more in two single-state polls of Nevada and South Carolina. They have until 11:59 p.m. on Feb. 18 to qualify for the debate, which is being hosted by NBC News, MSNBC and the Nevada Independent.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Nevada Democrats are cheering the high turnout in the first two days of early voting of their state’s Democratic presidential caucuses, hoping that the strong participation will translate to enthusiasm for beating President Donald Trump in November.

The Nevada Democratic Party reported that over 11,800 voted on Saturday, the first of four days of early voting, leading up to the official caucus date of Saturday, February 22. To put that number in perspective, about 84,000 total Nevada Democrats caucused in 2016.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite

A top National Institutes of Health official said Sunday that at least 40 Americans on a quarantined cruise ship in Japan have been infected with the deadly coronavirus.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with host Margaret Brennan on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that infected Americans aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship would be treated at hospitals in Japan. Fauci gave the number as 40, though other reports indicated that the number might be higher.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

It wasn’t a campaign event, but this year’s Daytona 500 race had many of the trappings of a MAGA rally with spectators in red hats, waving American flags, and holding Trump signs inside and outside the Daytona International Speedway.

President Donald Trump’s reelection machine took full advantage of the millions of NASCAR eyeballs watching on race day by airing an ad on Fox and flying a bright red “KEEP AMERICA GREAT!” banner near the track. Fox carried the event live on television, and Fox News commentator and Trump stalwart Judge Jeanine Pirro, Donald Trump Jr. and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle watched from a VIP section of the track.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., rebuked Attorney General William Barr on Thursday for his role in reducing the proposed sentence of Trump associate Roger Stone earlier this week.

“A.G. Barr has deeply damaged the rule of law by withdrawing the DOJ’s sentencing recommendation, the act of interference in Trump’s retribution against [the] lead attorney in the Stone case,” Pelosi told reporters at her weekly press conference.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly seemingly unleashed on a number of news topics related to President Donald Trump during a 75 minutes speech at Drew University Wednesday night, but his description of his former boss’s call to Ukraine President Voldymor Zelinsky and defense of now-fired Col. Alexander Vindman are certain to get the most attention.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

Andrew Yang’s improbable rise in the Democratic primary came to an end Tuesday night when the entrepreneur and political newcomer announced he was leaving the race after a disappointing finish in New Hampshire.

“There was a part of me that thought that we might be able to win this race and get this done this cycle,” Yang told POLITICO in an interview. “And so there’s a lot of disappointment, because when you’re goal oriented and you’re a builder, it’s very hard to pat yourself on the back and say, job well done, if you didn’t win. But rationally and objectively, I know that we’ve done something unprecedented and remarkable.”

Read the rest of the story at Politico

The entire team prosecuting Roger Stone abruptly resigned from the criminal case on Tuesday after the Justice Department said it planned to reduce the recommended sentence for Stone, a longtime Trump associate.

The Justice Department on Tuesday said it was pulling back on its request to sentence Stone to seven to nine years in prison after President Donald Trump blasted the sentencing proposal as “a miscarriage of justice.”

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway on Monday hinted that additional officials could be forced out of their roles following the ousters last week of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Ambassador Gordon Sondland — both high-profile witnesses in the impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump.

Asked during an interview on “Fox & Friends” whether there will be more dismissals in the days to come, Conway said, “maybe,” and sought to defend Vindman’s removal from a detail at the National Security Council. Vindman’s twin brother Yevgeny, who had served as a senior lawyer on the NSC, was also forced out of the White House on Friday.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

The U.S. military is preparing to report a more than 50% jump in cases of traumatic brain injury stemming from Iran’s missile attack on a base in Iraq last month, U.S. officials told Reuters on Monday.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of an announcement, said there were over 100 cases of TBI, up from the 64 previously reported last month.

The Pentagon declined to comment, but in the past had said to expect an increase in numbers in the weeks after the attack because symptoms can take time to manifest and troops can sometimes take longer to report them.

Read the rest of the story at HuffPost.

“Parasite,” Bong Joon-ho’s gleefully twisted tale of economic inequality, won top honors at the 92nd Academy Awards on Sunday, closing out a ceremony that ran for more than three hours and featured a mix of splashy musical numbers and nods to real-world politics.

Click here for a look at six key moments and themes from the show from NBC News.

Seven candidates will face off in the Democratic debate ahead of New Hampshire’s primary election, ABC News announced Friday.

ABC News is hosting the eighth Democratic primary debate of the campaign cycle in partnership with Apple News and Hearst Television’s WMUR-TV, ABC’s affiliate station in New Hampshire. The debate, sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee, will take place at Saint Anselm College’s Sullivan Arena in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Read the rest of the story at ABC News

President Donald Trump lashed out early Tuesday morning at Sen. Mitt Romney over his vote to convict the president on two articles of impeachment, ridiculing the Utah lawmaker once again over his defeat in the 2012 presidential election.

“Had failed presidential candidate @MittRomney devoted the same energy and anger to defeating a faltering Barack Obama as he sanctimoniously does to me, he could have won the election,” Trump wrote online shortly after midnight. “Read the Transcripts!”

Read the rest of the story at Politico

Fred Guttenberg, who lost his 14-year-old daughter in the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, was escorted out of the gallery during President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday.

The dramatic moment unfolded as the president mentioned that he would protect gun rights. Guttenberg was heard shouting from the speaker’s box as the president spoke and he was quickly removed from the audience by a plainclothes police officer.

Read the rest of the story at ABC News.

Limited results released Tuesday by the Iowa Democratic Party show former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) leading Iowa’s Democratic presidential caucuses, with former Vice President Joe Biden in a surprising fourth place.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was in third place in the initial returns, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota was in fifth. 
 
The results remained difficult to parse: Only 62% of precincts have been counted, and it is unknown whether they are representative of the full state. Sanders led by one metric (the final popular vote) while Buttigieg led by another (state delegate equivalents).

Read the rest of the story at HuffPost.

Surreal will be the word of the evening as President Trump marches into the same House chamber where he was impeached just seven weeks ago to address the nation even as he is on trial for high crimes and misdemeanors on the other side of the Capitol.

The president’s annual address on Tuesday comes after two weeks of arguments on the Senate floor about whether he should be removed from office and a day before a scheduled final vote. With acquittal virtually assured, Mr. Trump will use his speech to set the terms for the remainder of the year as he heads toward the November election in search of a second term.

Read the rest of the story at The New York Times

Saying Donald Trump has “betrayed our national security” and will do so again, Rep. Adam Schiff used his closing arguments in the president’s impeachment trial on Monday to urge the Senate to take a stand against “a man without character.”

“We must say enough — enough! He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again,” Schiff, D-Calif., told the Senate. “He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all.”

Read the rest of the story and see the video at NBC News

The Senate on Friday night ushered in the final phase of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial hours after an effort to call witnesses failed largely on party lines, with an all-but-assured acquittal set for next week.

Senators passed a resolution from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., laying out the rules for closing the roughly two-week-long trial. The resolution, which passed by a vote of 53-47, sets the final vote on Trump’s fate for Wednesday at 4 p.m.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

As the Senate impeachment trial goes into its third week, support for removing President Donald Trump from office remains steady, with half of voters registering approval for his conviction despite his all-but-certain acquittal, according to the latest POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

The new poll conducted Jan. 29-30 and released Saturday shows minimal change in public opinion about the trial. While 50 percent approval and 43 percent disapproval for a Senate conviction represent a slightly wider gap than the last POLITICO/Morning Consult survey, both numbers remain within the poll’s margin of error.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

More than two months before he asked Ukraine’s president to investigate his political opponents, President Trump directed John R. Bolton, then his national security adviser, to help with his pressure campaign to extract damaging information on Democrats from Ukrainian officials, according to an unpublished manuscript by Mr. Bolton.

Mr. Trump gave the instruction, Mr. Bolton wrote, during an Oval Office conversation in early May that included the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, who is now leading the president’s impeachment defense.

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

The State Department has now warned Americans to avoid all travel to China due to the “rapidly spreading” coronavirus outbreak. The decision came after the World Health Organization designated the outbreak a global public health emergency in an attempt to get more resources and increase international coordination to fight it.

The U.S. now has six confirmed cases of the virus, the most recent being the first confirmed instance of the disease spreading from person-to-person in the country. The new patient, announced Thursday, is the husband of an Illinois woman who was diagnosed with the virus earlier this month.

Read the rest of the story at CBS News.

President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner defended his job leading the White House’s “Middle East peace plan” by boasting that he’s read “25 books” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this week.

During an interview with Sky News Arabic, Kushner claimed, “I’ve been studying this now for three years. I’ve read 25 books on it, I’ve spoken to every leader in the region, I’ve spoken to everyone who’s been involved in this.”

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

Alan Dershowitz has maintained that nothing in John Bolton’s book would be impeachable, and when asked today by Ted Cruz if it would matter if President Donald Trump engaged in a quid pro quo, said not when you consider a president’s “mixed motives.”

Dershowitz said: “The only thing that would make a quid pro quo unlawful is if the quo were in some way illegal.”

He mostly focused on the question of motive, highlighting “public motive,” personal political motives, and pure financial motivations.

As far as political motivations go, Dershowitz argued that “every public official that I know believe that his election is in the public interest”

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

President Donald Trump doubled down his attacks against Democrats and his impeachment trial at a New Jersey campaign rally Tuesday night, accusing them of pursuing “deranged partisan crusades” and reminding supporters of the importance of winning back the House of Representatives in November.

“The Congressional Democrats are obsessed with demented hoaxes, crazy witch hunts and deranged partisan crusades,” Trump said, speaking at the Wildwoods Convention Center by the New Jersey shore in his shortest rally of the campaign so far.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., acknowledged to Republican senators during a private meeting Tuesday that he did not currently have the votes to avoid calling witnesses in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, a GOP aide familiar with his comments told NBC News.

Although the votes are not yet secured, Republicans appeared confident Tuesday evening that they would ultimately succeed in blocking witnesses. Senate Republican leadership exerted strong pressure on the party’s members to vote against calling witnesses, two sources familiar with the matter said.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

President Donald Trump stood beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday as he announced his long waited Middle East peace proposal. Even before the announcement, the plan was earning massive skepticism.

“My vision presents a win-win opportunity for both sides, a realistic two-state solution that resolves the risk of Palestinian statehood into security,” Trump said in an address from the White House. “This plan will double Palestinian territory and set the capital of the Palestinian state in eastern Jerusalem where the United States will happily open an embassy.”

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

Alan Dershowitz, the famed former Harvard law professor who is serving on President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team, argued Monday night that even if explosive allegations reported to have been made by former national security adviser John Bolton are true, they wouldn’t rise to the level of impeachment.

The New York Times reported Sunday night that in an unpublished manuscript of Bolton’s coming book, Trump told Bolton that nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine wouldn’t be released until it offered assistance with investigations of Democratic targets, including former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

President Donald Trump’s legal team began their defense of the president in Trump-ian fashion on Saturday, charging Democrats were the ones who are trying to interfere in the 2020 election and accusing lead House manager Adam Schiff of being dishonest.

Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow also gave an astonishing explanation for why his client turned to outsiders for his dealings with Ukraine — he doesn’t trust his own officials.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Basketball lost one of its greatest competitors and most accomplished players Sunday when Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash in California. The five-time NBA champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist was 41.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

For more than an hour one evening in 2018, President Trump sat around a dinner table in a private suite in his Washington hotel with a group of donors, including two men at the center of the impeachment inquiry, talking about golf, trade, politics — and removing the United States ambassador to Ukraine.

The conversation, captured on a recording made public Saturday, contradicted Mr. Trump’s repeated statements that he does not know the two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who went on to work with the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to carry out a pressure campaign on Ukraine.

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

President Donald Trump, flashing the fixation of a former reality television showman, lamented Friday that his impeachment defense team was being forced to present its case during the “Death Valley” of broadcast time slots.

“After having been treated unbelievably unfairly in the House, and then having to endure hour after hour of lies, fraud & deception by Shifty Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer & their crew, looks like my lawyers will be forced to start on Saturday, which is called Death Valley in T.V.,” Trump wrote on Twitter.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

The Prince of Wales was greeting dignitaries, including world leaders, at an event to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – but seemed to ignore US Vice-President Mike Pence.

A Buckingham Palace official has denied this was a snub, telling the BBC that the prince and Mr Pence had a “long and warm conversation” before the ceremony began.

See the video at The BBC.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut accused the president of misleading the American public for weeks by denying any U.S. personnel were injured in an Iranian missile strike earlier this month and downplaying the severity of their injuries once they became public.

Before leaving the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said the injuries sustained by the American service members in the attack on a base in Iraq were “not very serious.”

Read the rest of the story at CBS News.

President Donald Trump posted more than 140 times on Twitter on Wednesday, surpassing his mid-December record for the most daily tweets and retweets during his presidency.

The president flooded his Twitter account during the second day of the Senate’s impeachment trial, with 41 posts hitting the internet between 12 and 1 a.m., or one every 88 seconds, according to the site Factba.se, which tracks and indexes Trump’s tweets and speeches. He broke his all-time record for retweets, with more than 120 by late Wednesday afternoon.

Read the rest of the story at Politico

On the third anniversary of his inauguration and on the brink of a historic Senate impeachment trial, voters are still giving President Donald Trump low marks on his third-quarter report card.

According to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, just over two-in-10 voters — 21 percent of respondents — give Trump an “A” grade for the job he has done as president, and another 17 percent give him a “B.” The 38 percent who give Trump an “A” or a “B” is equal to the 38 percent of voters who give Trump an “F” in the new poll.

Read the rest of the story at Politico.

CNN tonight released new polling on the impeachment of President Donald Trump ahead of the Senate trial.

The poll finds that 51 percent support the Senate convicting and removing Trump from office. Along political lines, that’s 89 percent of Democrats, 8 percent of Republicans, and 48 percent of independents.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

The New York Times’ editorial board endorsed two female senators for the Democratic nomination for president Sunday: Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.

The Times’ editorial board sat with nine leading candidates last month for on-the-record interviews, transcripts of which were later annotated and published in full.

Read the rest of the story at Politico.

Eleven American troops were treated for concussions after Iranian missiles struck two Iraqi bases where the servicemembers were stationed, the military said on Thursday, contradicting earlier statements by President Trump that no Americans had been injured.

The Jan. 8 attack on bases near Baghdad and Erbil, Iraq, were launched in retaliation for the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a senior figure in Iran’s military, in a drone strike ordered by Mr. Trump.

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

Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz and former independent counsel lawyers Ken Starr and Robert Ray are expected to join President Donald Trump’s legal team ahead of the Senate impeachment trial, CNN reported Friday.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Pamela Brown reported that the pair will join Trump’s defense team, which already includes lead lawyers Pat Cipollone and Jay Sekulow.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

The Trump administration violated the law by withholding military aid to Ukraine, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a decision released Thursday.

“In the summer of 2019, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) withheld from obligation funds appropriated to the Department of Defense (DOD) for security assistance to Ukraine,” the government watchdog’s ruling said.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

The police in Ukraine have opened a criminal investigation into whether allies of President Trump had the United States ambassador to the country under surveillance while she was stationed in Kyiv, the Ukrainian government said on Thursday.

Democrats in the House of Representative on Tuesday revealed text messages to and from Lev Parnas — an associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer — pointing to surveillance of the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, just before Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate was scheduled to begin.

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

A new lawsuit filed Wednesday by the attorney general of the Virgin Islands claims that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked girls to his estate on his private island as recently as 2018, as first reported by The New York Times.

The lawsuit against the wealthy investor’s estate accuses him of sexually abusing young women and girls in the Caribbean, including some as young as 12 years old.

Read the rest of the story at ABC News.

Former senior CIA official Douglas London claimed in an article on Wednesday that President Donald Trump is “obsessed” with killing celebrity targets for the “immediate gratification” of media headlines while ignoring “important threats” and long-term interests.

“When it comes to intelligence, like with so much else, President Donald Trump likes big names. It’s this focus on celebrity, headlines, and immediate gratification — versus substance, impact, and consequences — that so often motivates him,” claimed London in the article for Just Security, drawing on his experience working under the Trump administration. “Partly because of this, as a senior CIA counterterrorist manager, my team and I often struggled in persuading the president to recognize the most important threats.”

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

The Senate is expected to officially accept the articles of impeachment Thursday, after they were handed off by key members of the House late Wednesday, officially triggering the third presidential impeachment trial in presidential history.

House managers, who were officially revealed on Wednesday, will read the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump in the Senate chamber sometime in the afternoon, with House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff taking a lead role.

Read the rest of the story at ABC News.

The Russian government resigned on Wednesday after President Vladimir Putin proposed sweeping constitutional changes affecting the balance of power in the country.

During his annual state of the nation speech, Putin proposed shifting power from the president to the prime minister and parliament, according to Reuters, by giving the lower house the power to choose the prime minister and other key positions. He also suggested that the State Council advisory body should be granted more powers.

Read the rest of the story at Politico.

A resolution to curb President Trump’s military authority in Iran has enough votes to pass the Senate, leading Democrats announced Tuesday, stating that Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins will join three other members of the GOP who had previously announced their support for the measure to invoke Congress’ war powers.

Read the rest of the story at The Washington Post.

Rudy Giuliani wrote a letter requesting a private meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, then the president-elect of Ukraine, with President Donald Trump’s “knowledge and consent,” according to records released Tuesday by House Democrats.

The letter was part of the evidence turned over to the House impeachment investigators by lawyers for Lev Parnas, the Giuliani associate who is awaiting trial on campaign finance charges. It bolsters Democrats’ argument that Giuliani was doing Trump’s bidding by trying to dig up dirt on political rival Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was once confident he could get rid of the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. As more information becomes available, however, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

A CNN report explained Monday that despite Trump’s urging, forcing senators to vote against a fair trial would put Republicans up for reelection in danger of losing their seats.

Read the rest of the story at Raw Story

President Donald Trump authorized the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani seven months ago if Iran’s increased aggression resulted in the death of an American, according to five current and former senior administration officials.

The presidential directive in June came with the condition that Trump would have final signoff on any specific operation to kill Soleimani, officials said.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News

Senator Cory Booker announced the suspension of  his presidential campaign on Twitter Monday.

Booker tweeted a video announcing his suspension, with the following comment: “It’s with a full heart that I share this news—I’m suspending my campaign for president. To my team, supporters, and everyone who gave me a shot—thank you. I am so proud of what we built, and I feel nothing but faith in what we can accomplish together.”

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Friday that the House will move to send the two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump to the Senate this week, signaling an end to a weekslong standoff with Senate Republicans over the rules governing the impeachment trial.

In a letter to colleagues, Pelosi said she had instructed House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) to “be prepared to bring to the Floor next week a resolution to appoint managers and transmit articles of impeachment to the Senate.” Pelosi added that she would be consulting with her caucus at a Tuesday meeting “on how we proceed further,” but the letter is a clear sign of her backing down from demands about the Senate trial.

Read the rest of the story at HuffPost.

Conservative Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) accused Donald Trump Saturday of “selling” American troops to Saudi Arabia after the president boasted that the nation has deposited $1 billion into a bank he did not identify for “more troops.”
“He sells troops,” Amash tersely noted in a tweet.
 
Other critics erupted on Twitter over a possible future in which U.S. soldiers could be sent as mercenaries to any high-bidding country to risk their lives, regardless of a nation’s ideology or rationale for fighting.

Read the rest of the story at HuffPost.

Security video purportedly showing the outside of millionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s New York jail cell at the time of his attempted suicide in July has been lost, federal prosecutors claim.

The five hours of footage taken by a camera outside of Epstein’s cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan between 11 p.m. on July 22 and 4 a.m. on July 23 was mistakenly not preserved, federal prosecutor Geoffrey S. Berman wrote in a letter sent Thursday to U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth M. Karas.

Read the rest of the story at ABC News.

The American public is highly skeptical of the benefits of President Donald Trump’s latest actions against Iran, and most fear that his decision to kill Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani will have dangerous unintended consequences.

That’s according to a USA Today/Ipsos poll, which found 55% of Americans think the fatal airstrike on Soleimani last week made the country “less safe,” while only 24% thought it made the country somewhat or much more safe. In addition, a majority — 52% — of Americans characterized the fatal airstrike, which prompted twin Iranian retaliatory strikes on US forces in Iraq earlier this week, as “reckless,” versus 34% who did not.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

Iranian officials have denied claims that they mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet. The plane crashed early Wednesday morning soon after takeoff from Tehran’s airport, killing everyone on board.

CBS News has learned that U.S. officials are confident Iran shot down the jetliner in the hours after the Iranian missile attack on U.S. targets earlier this week. There were 176 people killed in the crash: 82 Iranians, 63 Canadians, 11 Ukrainians, 10 Swedish, four Afghan, three German and three British nationals.

Read the rest of the story at CBS News.

Investigators will look into the possibility that a missile shot down the Ukrainian passenger jet that crashed in Iran, a senior Ukrainian official said on Thursday, but he did not rule out a range of other possibilities for the disaster that killed at least 176 people.

The official, Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, said that investigators were following up on unconfirmed reports that fragments of a Russian-made Tor surface-to-air missile — a system used by Iran — had been found near where the plane came down.

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

Members of Congress were briefed today on Iran, and Senator Mike Lee (R- UT) wanted to make it clear to reporters afterwards that he was pissed off.

Lee erupted on what he called an “insulting and demeaning” briefing that he deemed “probably the worst briefing at least on a military issue I’ve seen.”

He said the briefing was the deciding factor in him coming around to support the War Powers Act resolution being pushed by Democratic colleague Tim Kaine.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

 Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, flatly refused on Wednesday to negotiate with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the terms of the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Trump, and accused the speaker of playing politics with a solemn process at a time of possible war.

A day after he announced that he had the votes to conduct a trial without agreeing to Democrats’ demands for witnesses, Mr. McConnell said that the House had no choice now but to end “shameless game-playing” and transmit the two articles of impeachment against Mr. Trump that it approved last month.

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

A Ukraine International Airlines 737-800 crashed just minutes after takeoff from the Tehran airport in Iran on Wednesday morning; there were nearly 180 people on board and reportedly no survivors of the crash.

According to the Associated Press, the plane took off and then stopped sending flight data almost immediately after becoming airborne. The crash came just hours after Iran launched missile attacks against two sites in Iraq as retaliation for last week’s US airstrike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, but the two incidents do not appear to be connected.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

“All is well!” and “so far, so good,” President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday night after Iran launched ballistic missiles at U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq.

The president also said he would make a statement Wednesday morning.

“Missiles launched from Iran at two military bases located in Iraq. Assessment of casualties & damages taking place now. So far, so good!” the president tweeted.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Rep. Duncan Hunter will officially step down from Congress next week, more than a month after the California Republican pleaded guilty to conspiracy to misuse campaign funds.

Hunter had previously said he would leave Congress after the holidays. His resignation will take effect Jan. 13, according to a copy of the letter he sent to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday.

Read the rest of the story at Politico.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper directly pushed back on President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to bomb Iranian cultural sites, telling the press that the US military “will follow the laws of armed conflict” that prohibit attacking civilian, cultural, and religious sites that have no military value.

In comments to CNN, Esper on Monday not so subtly contradicted Trump’s Twitter brinkmanship, a striking and ominous break between the Pentagon’s top official and the nation’s Commander-in-Chief just a day after the President reiterated his threats to attack Iran’s cultural sites. While Esper is a civilian appointee and not technically part of the military chain of command, Article 90 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice makes it clear that all members of the military have a duty to disobey any illegal or unlawful orders.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

Mona Zabihian, an Iranian American, attempted to return to Washington state from Canada late Saturday after attending a concert — a trip she said she makes several times a year with no issues. This time was different, Zabihian said, as she and dozens of others were questioned and held for hours.

“We went inside, we saw a bunch of other Iranians, pregnant woman, children. I saw one of my friends from Seattle,” she told NBC News.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

The death of Iran’s top military general Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a drone strike authorized by President Donald Trump Thursday evening, came as news to many in Congress who were not informed of the administration’s planned military attack. However, that was not the case for several random members of the president’s private south Florida golf resort, Mar-a-Lago.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite’s Law & Crime Blog.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Sunday that he remains “hopeful” that enough Republicans senators will join Democratic calls for witnesses and documents in the forthcoming Senate impeachment trial.

“I hope, pray and believe there’s a decent chance that four Republicans will join us — if they do we will have a fair trial,” Schumer said in an interview on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” noting the minimum number of Republicans Democrats will need to follow through on their request. “I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will come forward.”

Read the rest of the story at Politico

Sen. Chris Van Hollen on Sunday asserted that the Trump administration was obligated to “present the evidence” that justified an U.S. airstrike against Iran’s top military commander, which has inflamed regional tensions and heightened the potential for further conflict between Washington and Tehran.

“I think we learned the hard way, Chris, in Iraq, in the Iraq war, that administrations sometimes manipulate and cherry-pick intelligence to further their political goals. That’s what got us into the Iraq war,” the Maryland Democrat told host Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”

Read the rest of the story at Politico.

Over 200 members of Congress asked the Supreme Court to consider overturning Roe v. Wade, which guarantees the right to an abortion, in a brief urging the court to uphold a Louisiana law severely restricting abortion.

The 39 senators and 168 House members submitted the amicus brief in the case of June Medical Services LLC v. Gee, which the Supreme Court will consider this spring.

Read the rest of the story at CBS News.

On Thursday evening, Donald Trump pushed out on Twitter the name of the alleged whistleblower whose complaint led to the president’s impeachment.

Trump’s personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, retweeted a post by the re-election campaign’s official “war room” account that was aimed at the whistleblower’s attorney Mark Zaid. “It’s pretty simple. The CIA ‘whistleblower’ is not a real whistleblower!” reads the tweet, which links to a Washington Examiner item. That piece, published Dec. 3, includes the alleged whistleblower’s name in the headline. 

Read the rest of the story at The Daily Beast.

President Donald Trump threatened on Wednesday to get the federal government involved in “taking care of the homeless population in California” if Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom “can’t fix the problem” soon.

In response to a video of Newsom criticizing the Trump administration for failing to solve homelessness, President Trump posted on Twitter, “Governor Gavin N has done a really bad job on taking care of the homeless population in California. If he can’t fix the problem, the Federal Govt. will get involved!”

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

Christmas Day came and went with no sign of the “gift” that North Korea warned could come.

Earlier this month, Pyongyang set an year-end deadline for the U.S. to make new concessions in talks over the country’s nuclear arsenal.

And amid fears that North Korea was expanding a factory linked to the production of long-range nuclear missiles, the U.S. flew several spy planes over the Korean Peninsula during the holiday, according to South Korean media, citing military aircraft tracker Aircraft Spots.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

Hours after President Donald Trump asked Americans to unify and embrace, he got on Twitter to launch new attacks on his political foes and the House Democrats’ effort to impeach him.

See his tweets and read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

President Trump angrily responded to the impeachment he had long been dreading on Wednesday, lashing out at his Democratic accusers in a rambling two-hour speech and calling for their defeat in November.

Moments after the House passed two articles of impeachment against him, he told a campaign rally in a state he won in 2016 that is crucial to his re-election that the vote was an attempt to “nullify the ballots of tens of millions of patriotic Americans.”

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

The House will delay sending the articles of impeachment it approved to the Senate until rules are established for the trial of President Donald Trump, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday night.

Pelosi, D-Calif., excoriated Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for saying he would coordinate with the White House counsel during the coming trial, which she likened to the foreman of a jury’s being in “cahoots” with the defendant’s attorney.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

The House Rules Committee voted along party lines to approve six hours of debate on the House floor Wednesday as lawmakers vote on two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump.

Democrats and Republicans will have three hours apiece to make their case ahead of votes.

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

House Democrats told a federal court on Monday that they will continue impeachment investigations into President Donald Trump after the scheduled vote on articles of impeachment later this week.

In a 66-page filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, attorneys for congressional investigators led by House General Counsel Douglas N. Letter vowed that Democrats on the Judiciary Committee would continue their impeachment inquiry into whether Trump committed obstruction of justice–regardless of the outcome of the House’s current “narrow impeachment” process premised on the president withholding military aid to the Ukraine in an apparent scheme to obtain an investigation into Joe Biden‘s son.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.

Rudolph W. Giuliani said on Monday that he provided President Trump with detailed information this year about how the United States ambassador to Ukraine was, in Mr. Giuliani’s view, impeding investigations that could benefit Mr. Trump, setting in motion the ambassador’s recall from her post.

In an interview, Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, described how he passed along to Mr. Trump “a couple of times” accounts about how the ambassador, Marie L. Yovanovitch, had frustrated efforts that could be politically helpful to Mr. Trump. They included investigations involving former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Ukrainians who disseminated documents that damaged Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.

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

Democratic lawmakers representing conservative-leaning districts announced one by one on Monday that they would cast votes this week to impeach President Trump, signaling that a critical bloc of the most politically vulnerable Democrats is pulling together behind the party’s effort to seek his removal from office.

Ahead of a historic vote on two articles of impeachment, about a half-dozen first-term Democrats in districts that Mr. Trump won in 2016 — all impeachment skeptics — said they had become convinced that they had no choice but to move forward with official charges of high crimes and misdemeanors against the president.

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

The Hallmark Channel said Sunday that it would “re-establish” its relationship with the wedding company behind a same-sex commercial, just days after Hallmark pulled the ad amid pressure from a conservative advocacy group.

In a statement Sunday, the president of Hallmark Cards, Mike Perry, said Hallmark’s parent company, Crown Media Family Networks, had been “agonizing” over its decision to remove the ad and the “hurt it has unintentionally caused.”

Read the rest of the story at NBC News.

President Donald Trump went on a rant attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats over his likely impeachment.

“Nancy’s teeth were falling out of her mouth, and she didn’t have time to think!” Trump said Sunday evening in response to a tweet from GOP Rep. Mark Meadows criticizing Pelosi’s answer on dropping bribery as a potential article of impeachment.

Read the rest of the story at Mediaite.