According to Pelosi’s spokesman, Mnuchin and Pelosi spoke by phone Thursday afternoon to discuss prospects for a comprehensive economic relief bill when White House communications director Alyssa Farah told reporters at the White House that the administration does not support legislation of that kind.
President Donald Trump was hoarse throughout an extended telephone interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity on Thursday, yet insisted he was feeling great.
At one point, Trump lost his voice while accusing former Vice President Joe Biden of “choking like a dog” during their debate last week.
He also struggled with his voice while discussing absentee ballots.
Read the rest of the story and listen to the audio at HuffPost
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday he hasn’t gone to the White House since August because their approach to safety during the coronavirus pandemic “is different than mine.”
Speaking at an event in Erlanger, Kentucky, McConnell, the most powerful Republican in Congress, suggested he didn’t think the Trump administration had been doing enough to keep the White House safe from Covid-19.
“I haven’t actually been to the White House since August the 6th, because my impression was their approach to how to handle this is different from mine and what I insisted that we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing,” McConnell said.
A Michigan militia was plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who has come under fire from President Donald Trump, according to the FBI.
Defendants Adam Fox, Barry Croft, Ty Garbin, Kaleb Franks, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta were charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping, according to court documents. The domestic terrorism investigation involved both confidential informants and undercover employees who recorded conversations, texts, online chats and phone calls with the defendants.
In an affidavit, an FBI agent wrote that the bureau learned through social media in early 2020 that a group was “discussing the violent overthrow of certain government and law-enforcement components.” At a meeting in June, defendants Fox and Croft allegedly met with about 13 others in Dublin, Ohio, where they discussed “creating a society that followed the U.S. Bill of Rights and where they could be self-sufficient.” Several members of the group “talked about murdering ‘tyrants’ or ‘taking’ a sitting governor.”
President Donald Trump vowed Thursday not to participate in next week’s debate with Democratic nominee Joe Biden after organizers announced it will take place virtually because of the president’s diagnosis of COVID-19.
“I’m not going to do a virtual debate” with Biden, Trump told Fox News, moments after the Commission on Presidential Debates announced the changes due to Trump’s diagnosis.
That cast serious doubts on whether the event will go forward, even as Biden’s campaign vowed that its candidate will participate.
The second presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden will be “virtual,” with the two participants holding forth from separate remote locations, a new twist to the event added in the wake of the president being exposed to the coronavirus.
The debate’s “town hall” format will remain in place, the Commission on Presidential Debates said Thursday, with the moderator, Steve Scully, staying at the event’s original location, the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County in Miami, Florida.
Vice President Mike Pence didn’t come to the first vice presidential debate against Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) to answer questions about what’s going on right now.
Since the train wreck of a presidential debate last week, the nation’s government has been in a total frenzy.
President Donald Trump was just hospitalized for several days after contracting the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 211,000 Americans and left the economy in pieces. The White House recently held what is now being considered a superspreader event, and more than two dozen administration officials, from security staff to top-ranking generals, have contracted COVID-19. And still, Trump continues to downplay the disease, calling it a “blessing” in his life.
Top former Justice Department officials, including U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and deputy Rod Rosenstein, helped drive a Trump administration policy that resulted in the separation of children from their parents, a draft inspector general report shows.
The “zero tolerance” policy ultimately separated nearly 3,000 children from their parents for crossing the border illegally, which is a misdemeanor at the first offense.
Sessions announced the policy in April 2018, saying that every immigrant who crossed the U.S. border illegally would be prosecuted, including parents with young children. It resulted in children being separated from their parents and generated a huge public outcry.
With plexiglass and more than 12 feet of distance separating them, Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic nominee Sen. Kamala Harris of California will debate in Salt Lake City on Wednesday night in the first and only one-on-one matchup between the vice presidential candidates.
The showdown comes as President Donald Trump and several in his orbithave tested positive for the novel coronavirus, raising questions on a transfer of power to the vice president were Trump at 74 — or Democratic nominee Joe Biden at 77 — to become too ill to serve.
Stephen Miller, a senior policy aide to President Donald Trump tested positive for coronavirus, he said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Today, I tested positive for COVID-19 and am in quarantine,” said Miller, who has been one of the chief architects of Trump’s immigration policies. He added he has been working remotely for the last five days and has been self-isolating.
Miller, who has been regularly traveling with the president and one of his closest aides, is the latest aide in the Trump orbit to test positive for Covid-19. Numerous people tied to the White House or campaign have tested positive, including Trump and the first lady.
President Donald Trump reversed course Tuesday night and urged Congress to approve a series of coronavirus relief measures that he would sign, including a new round of $1,200 stimulus checks for Americans.
Earlier in the day, he had halted talks between top Democrats and Republicans until “after I win” the election, which appeared to have killed the chances of a new package. Both moves by the president, who was released Monday from the hospital where he was being treated for Covid-19, were made on Twitter.
There are so many scenes in Craig Mazin’s brilliant HBO miniseries “Chernobyl” that remind me of what’s happened here and now, in the United States, in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Obviously, there are myriad similarities between the Soviet Union’s deceptive response to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the White House’s deceptive response to COVID-19 — principally, Donald Trump’s intrinsic compulsion to lie about literally everything, even when it harms him politically.
Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic challenger Kamala Harris will be separated by a plexiglass barrier during their debate on Wednesday, a source familiar with the matter said, in an effort to lower the risk of coronavirus transmission.
The debate, the only one scheduled between the vice presidential candidates, is scheduled for Salt Lake City, six days after President Donald Trump announced he had contracted the virus.
The Commission on Presidential Debates, which oversees the debate, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Joe Biden said Monday that he wasn’t surprised that President Donald Trump contracted Covid-19 because the president hasn’t followed health experts’ guidelines to wear a mask and social distance.
“Quite frankly, I wasn’t surprised,” the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee said during an NBC News town hall with host Lester Holt in Miami.
President Donald Trump returned to the White House on Monday evening after being treated for Covid-19 for three days at Walter Reed Medical Center — and immediately took off his mask to pose for pictures before walking in.
The highly choreographed moment on the Truman Balcony came hours after Trump suggested online that the disease is not that serious a threat.
Trump walked out of the hospital’s main entrance shortly after 6:30 p.m. in a mask and a suit and tie and pumped his fist for the cameras before being driven to Marine One for the short trip back to the White House. He declined to answer questions from reporters.
Joe Biden’s advantage over President Donald Trump has expanded and the former vice president now holds his widest lead of the cycle with less than a month remaining before Election Day, according to a new nationwide CNN Poll conducted by SSRS.
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This was unprecedented in the long history of the human ego.
Quarantined because he has a serious case of a deadly and highly contagious disease, the president* of the United States on Sunday decided to throw himself a parade. So he arranged to be locked in an airtight vehicle with a couple of sacrificial lambs from the U.S. Secret Service so he could drive around the block and wave to the gathering of unemployables that has gathered outside Walter Reed National Medical Center to stand vigil for their Dear Leader. Now, we expect our presidents to have monstrous egos. Otherwise, no rational person would want that job. Because we are a maddening, inconstant people, however, we also expect the occasional ritual humility, some at least performative bows toward the humble. This is, after all, one of only two people fully capable of blowing up the entire world.
New Jersey health officials said Sunday that at least 206 guests may have been exposed to COVID-19 at President Donald Trump’s campaign fundraiser on Thursday, just hours before he announced his positive test result.
The White House gave state officials the names of 206 people who attended the high-dollar event at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, according to the New Jersey Department of Health. The list ― which does not include staff working at the club ― allows health officials to have enough information to accurately contact trace in connection with the fundraiser.
Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris are expected to take the debate stage Wednesday night against an extraordinary backdrop that has raised the stakes of an event that for decades has been a routine, inconsequential fixture of presidential elections.
No vice president has debated while the president is known to be sick and possibly still in the hospital. And never have two vice presidential nominees debated at a time when Americans are giving far more than cursory thought to how each might lead in the top job.
President Donald Trump’s medical team said Sunday that Trump’s condition was improving after multiple “episodes” over the weekend while also disclosing that Trump was placed on a steroid therapy typically used in more severe Covid-19 cases.
The update came as Trump sought to portray himself as unaffected by the deadly disease, posting photos of himself working from the hospital and taping multiple different video addresses in which he reassured the public he was doing well. On Sunday evening, he left the hospital grounds for a short motorcade ride to wave to supporters gathered outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
President Donald Trump on Sunday briefly left his hospital room at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he is being treated for Covid-19, to drive past a group of supporters, a move medical experts and Democrats swiftly criticized as “insanity.”
The president posted a video to his Twitter account around 5:15 p.m. announcing that he would “pay a little surprise to some of the great patriots that we have out on the street.” A few minutes later, the presidential motorcade slowly drove by the perimeter of the hospital, where a crowd had been gathering since Friday night. Trump was seen through the window of an SUV waving and wearing what appeared to be a cloth mask, as opposed to a more protective N95 mask.
News that Trump and first lady Melania have tested positive for the coronavirus means our national health emergency has taken an extraordinary turn. “If he becomes sick, it could raise questions about whether he should remain on the ballot at all,” the New York Times reported early Friday morning.
After months of purposefully downplaying the pandemic, mocking the idea of wearing masks, and waging war on scientists fighting the public health crisis, Trump instantly becomes the world’s most famous Covid-19 patient.
And Fox News made him sick.
Read the rest of Eric Boehlert’s piece at subscribe at PressRun Media
You’re gonna hear from a lot of people today imploring you to offer sympathy, thoughts, and prayers to President Donald Trump and Christmas-hating wife Melania since they have tested positive for COVID-19. You’re gonna hear how Democrats should show how above politics we are when it comes to the human pain of our opponents. And that’s all well and good, but we all have to make our own decisions here, and my initial response is “Yeah, fuck that.”
U.S. stock futures and Asian shares fell Friday after President Donald Trump said he and first lady Melania Trump had tested positive for the new coronavirus.
The future contracts for both the S&P 500 and the Dow industrials lost 1.9%. Oil prices also slipped.
Trump tweeted news of his test results just hours after the White House announced that senior aide Hope Hicks had come down with the virus after traveling with the president several times this week.
Hope Hicks, a counselor and senior adviser to President Donald Trump, has tested positive for COVID-19, the president said Thursday night.
Hicks, one of Trump’s closest and most trusted aides, traveled on Air Force One with the president to Cleveland for Tuesday’s presidential debate and to Minnesota for a rally on Wednesday, Bloomberg said. She was photographed leaving Air Force One in Cleveland while not wearing a mask.
The House of Representatives passed a $2.2 trillion Covid-19 relief bill Thursday night as negotiations between the administration and Democrats have failed to yield a bipartisan deal and the time to pass new relief measures ahead of November’s election ticks away.
The measure passed 214-207. No Republicans supported it and 18 Democrats voted against it. Nearly all of the Democrats who voted against the bill are locked in close re-election races.
“Today’s package is another partisan exercise that will never become law,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., said in a statement about why she voted against it. “My focus remains on working with Democrats and Republicans to get relief to my district immediately, and partisan gamesmanship will not do it.”
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump tested positive for the coronavirus, he announced on Twitter early Friday.
“Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!” Trump, 74, tweeted.
Trump’s doctor, Sean Conley, said, “The President and First Lady are both well at this time, and they plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence.”
New York City reported its highest daily positivity rate since June on Tuesday, the same day elementary schools started welcoming students back in person and a day before restaurants began indoor dining.
The number — 3.25% — has been driven by rising cases in nine neighborhoods in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, officials said. As of Tuesday, they accounted for over 25.6% of new cases citywide over the past two weeks despite representing only 7.4% of the city’s overall population, according to the city’s health department. The 14-day average positivity rate in the nine ZIP codes ranged from 3.31% to 6.92% as of Tuesday.
“We are deeply concerned about the alarming increase in COVID-19 in the ZIP codes in Brooklyn and Queens,” NYC Health Commissioner Dave Chokshi said during a press briefing Tuesday.
Viewers from across the country let out their frustrations on social media while watching the first presidential debate as the face-off between President Trump and former Vice President Biden was marked by interruptions, name-calling and shouting from both candidates and moderator Chris Wallace.
Many Twitter users were critical of Wallace for his moderating skills and blamed him for not doing a good job keeping order during the 90 minutes.
Some called for moderators to have the option to silence the microphones after Trump repeatedly ignored calls to stop interrupting Biden during his turn to speak.
President Donald Trump refused to condemn white supremacist violence on Tuesday night, insisting without evidence that violence is a left-wing problem.
During the first presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News asked Trump if he was willing to condemn “white supremacists and militia groups” and tell them to “stand down” in places like Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon — cities where heavily armed far-right extremists have shown up to anti-racism demonstrations as counterprotesters.
“Sure, I’m willing to do that,” Trump said, “but I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.”
The first presidential debate Tuesday devolved into name-calling, shouting and insults as President Donald Trump derailed the discussion with constant interruptions, unfettered by a moderator who struggled to keep calm.
Trump talked constantly through the 90-minute debate, sometimes incoherently and other times rattling off unfounded and baseless attacks against Democrat Joe Biden while refusing to let the moderator even ask questions.
Pressed repeatedly, Trump refused to condemn extremist supporters or urge them to stay peaceful in the event of a disputed election while once again suggesting, without evidence, that it might be “rigged.”
For the past several decades, Donald Trump has been widely regarded as a great big phony. Everything about him is a mirage. He steals credit for the accomplishments of others, especially his predecessor, Barack Obama. His business model is all about slapping his goofy name on properties built by others. Even his outward appearance is a fraud: his unsubstantiated self-confidence, his hair, his clown makeup, his baggy suits designed to hide his doughy frame, even his shoes, which appear to have unusually high heels — it’s all intended to make him appear physically more powerful than he actually is. Fake, fake and fake.
It’s all a big show. In reality, he’s nothing more than a petty, brittle, small man — and a business failure.
House Democrats unveiled a scaled-back $2.2 trillion aid measure Monday in an attempt to boost long-stalled talks on COVID-19 relief, though there was no sign of progress in continuing negotiations between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
The latest Democratic measure would revive a $600-per-week pandemic jobless benefit and send a second round of $1,200 direct payments to most individuals. It would scale back an aid package to state and local governments to a still-huge $436 billion, send a whopping $225 billion to colleges and universities, and deliver another round of subsidies to businesses under the Paycheck Protection Program.
According to a report by the New York Times, multiple White House staffers spent this summer pressuring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to relax its recommendations about restarting schools in the fall and succeeded in getting several key documents and communications edited, because President Donald Trump wanted schools reopened before the election.
The staffers reportedly involved include Dr. Deborah Birx and Mark Short, Vice President Mike Pence‘s chief of staff. A key source for the Times article was Olivia Troye, a former Pence staffer and lifelong Republican who resigned last month and, since then, has come out in support of Joe Biden and vocally criticized the White House in interviews this month.
Revelations that President Donald Trump is personally liable for more than $400 million in debt are casting a shadow over his presidency that ethics experts say raises national security concerns he could be manipulated to sway U.S. policy by organizations or individuals he’s indebted to.
New scrutiny of Trump, who claims great success as a private businessman, comes after The New York Times reported that tax records show he is personally carrying a staggering amount of debt ― including more than $300 million in loans that will come due in the next four years.
More than 1 million people have died from Covid-19 since the coronavirus was first identified late last year in China, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
With more than 200,000 deaths, U.S. continues to lead the global death toll, followed by Brazil at 142,000 and India at 95,500, the tally on Monday showed.
“Our world has reached an agonizing milestone,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a video and written statement sent out shortly after the reported death toll hit 1 million. “It’s a mind-numbing figure. Yet we must never lose sight of each and every individual life.”
By happy accident, the latest bombshell from The New York Times dropped one day after some nice folks in New York sent along a copy of Without Compromise, a collection of pieces written for the late, lamented Village Voice by the late (and equally lamented) Wayne Barrett, who wrote that newspaper’s “Runnin’ Scared” column for almost 40 years. There is absolutely no point in trying to understand the current president*, the sleazoid New York milieu that birthed him as a public figure, and our immediate peril without having read Barrett’s dogged pursuit of Manhattan’s landshark demimonde and how it put the screws to everyone else. From the Go-Go Gordon Gecko 1980s all the way through Rudy Giuliani’s fealty to developers (and criminal cops) as the city’s mayor, without fear or favor, as the old muckrakers used to say, and using the country’s signature city as his index patient, Wayne Barrett traced the steady corruption that came along with nearly a half-century of shoving the nation’s wealth upwards, a process that, hitched to retrograde politics, made someone like El Caudillo Del Mar-a-Lago not only possible, but inevitable. That Barrett died the day before this president*’s thoroughly corrupt inauguration is one of those episodes in which history and Providence get together to rob us blind.
President Trump‘s former 2020 campaign manager and current campaign senior advisor, Brad Parscale, was taken into custody Sunday evening by Fort Lauderdale Police after allegedly threatening to harm himself at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, ABC News has confirmed.
According to a public information officer with the Ft. Lauderdale Police Department, a 911 call was placed by Parscale’s wife who advised that “her husband was armed, had access to multiple firearms inside the residence and was threatening to harm himself. Officers determined the only occupant inside the home was the adult male,” referring to Parscale.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Saturday that confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett are scheduled to begin Oct. 12.
“That’d be 16 days from nomination,” Graham told Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro, adding that confirmation hearings for 24 of the 42 Supreme Court justices were held within 16 days of their nominations.
Joe Biden’s campaign showered Donald Trump with mockery on Sunday after the president again demanded that his presidential opponent take a drug test before their first debate on Tuesday.
Trump baselessly suggested, first in a Sunday morning tweet and then later during a press conference, that Biden was taking performance enhancing drugs. Trump has been making similar claims for weeks in an apparent effort to preemptively dismiss a strong Biden showing in the first debate, after spending months attacking the former vice president’s mental acuity.
The New York Times obtained two decades of President Donald Trump’s tax information, reporting Sunday that the president paid only $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency and again during his first year in office.
The Times, which said it plans to publish additional stories based on the documents, reported that Trump has not paid any income taxes in 10 of the past 15 years, mostly because he reported significant losses. It reported that Trump is facing a decadelong Internal Revenue Service audit over a $72.9 million tax refund he received that could end up costing him more than $100 million.
Faced with an authoritarian ruler who proudly announced he has no intention of abiding the election outcome, the New York Times faced an editorial choice this week — how big to play the story? How much attention should the Times give to one of the most un-democratic things any sitting U.S. president has every said in public when Trump refused to commit to the peaceful transfer of power following the election. Should the Times run a banner, front-page headline, giving the story its full attention and indicating the historic significance of Trump’s promised power grab?
It should have, but the Times did not.
Donald Trump is currently the president of the United States, whether we like it or not. And that’s apparently his plan for the 2020 election, as he savagely sows doubt about the validity of the vote for the presidency. He keeps speaking in desperate but vague tones, with his accusations now having reached Trumpian shorthand like “fake news” and “Russia hoax” before it.
Now it’s “the ballots.” At a press briefing this week, asked again about and declining to support a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election, Trump said, “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster…The ballots are out of control. You know it, and you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”
President Donald Trump was loudly booed by members of the public on Thursday while visiting the casket of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has been lying in repose outside the Supreme Court.
Trump, accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, stood behind the court’s massive columns at the top of the court steps as people from the bottom of the steps loudly booed him and chanted, “Vote him out!”
Members of the public have been waiting for hours to file past the flag-draped casket, which will on Friday be moved to the Capitol building where Ginsburg will lie in state.
A pickup truck hit a protester Thursday night in Hollywood, California, and moments later a second vehicle hit a car participating in the same protest as it tried to leave the area, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The “largely peaceful” group of protesters began marching around 7 p.m. local time with only isolated reports of vandalism, but shortly after 9 p.m., things turned violent when a blue pickup truck traveling on Sunset Boulevard maneuvered through the crowd and became involved in an altercation, according to authorities. The driver of the truck attempted to get away from the situation, but police said he struck a protester standing in the street.
Stephanie Miller, John Fugelsang, Hal Sparks and Frangela…..the Sexy Liberal All Stars are comin’ back with ALL NEW and fully charged doses of hilarious insanity. And you don’t even need to mail in a ballot!! The perfect event for the run-up to the election….It’s ALL NEW…it’s badass…it’s the Sexy Liberal Virtual Tour #4!!
President Donald Trump really, really wants to fool voters into thinking he has a plan to make the health care system great again. But he really, really doesn’t.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, on Thursday, Trump signed executive orders he claims address two of the biggest concerns Americans have about the health care system: coverage for people with preexisting conditions and surprise medical bills.
The orders don’t do anything about anything, though. It’s just more vaporware from the Trump administration. Slogans, lies and exaggerations aren’t policies. Trump pitched his phantom plan by saying it rests on three pillars: “more choice,” “lower costs,” and “better care,” and that it would “put patients first.”
Having wrested hard-won independence from a monarch, the founders of our nation sought to form a new union where executive power was constrained by other branches of government. They did so knowing that men are not angels, and believing that through a system of checks and balances that set “ambition against ambition,” a fledgling democracy could survive, even thrive.
That beautiful construct has been put to the test by a president who neither understands nor respects our constitutional scheme or the value of democratic governance.
Read the rest of Rep. Schiff’s op-ed at The Los Angeles Times.
Dr. Anthony Fauci slapped down Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a former ophthalmologist with dubious qualifications, for “repeatedly” misrepresenting coronavirus data to support politically motivated attacks during a Senate hearing Wednesday. When Paul asked why Fauci is a “big fan” of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo despite the state having one of the world’s worst death rates, Fauci shot back, “No, you misconstrued that senator and you’ve done that repeatedly in the past.” He said New York got hit badly and “made some mistakes” but they now have a 1 percent test positivity rate by following CDC guidelines on face masks, social distancing, outdoor activity and washing hands. “Or they’ve developed enough community immunity,” Paul quipped.
Three days of public mourning for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of equality and pioneer of women’s rights, began Wednesday when her casket arrived at the Supreme Court for a dramatic procession up the steps that were lined by more than a hundred of her former law clerks.
Her casket was placed on the Lincoln Catafalque, once used for President Abraham Lincoln, before a ceremony inside the court’s Great Hall attended by family, friends and her fellow justices, all wearing masks.
President Donald Trump declined to say if he would accept the election results in November.
Asked at a press conference Wednesday if he would “commit to a peaceful transferal of power” if he lost the election, Trump said: “Well, we’re gonna have to see what happens.”
The president then tried, again, to delegitimize mail-in voting, saying: “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. The ballots are a disaster … Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a peaceful … there won’t be a transfer, frankly, there’ll be a continuation.”
As millions of Americans are set to vote by mail amid the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has repeatedly spread disinformation suggesting that mail-in voting is “fraudulent” — it is not.
A grand jury in Louisville, Kentucky, has indicted Detective Brett Hankison in the case of the shooting death of Breonna Taylor, charging him with three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment.
No charges were filed against Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Officer Myles Cosgrove, the other two police officers who were at the scene the night Taylor was fatally shot. Notably, no murder charges were filed against any of the men.
First-degree wanton endangerment is a felony that comes with a sentence of up to five years in prison under Kentucky law. Jefferson County Circuit Judge Annie O’Connell issued a warrant for Hankison’s arrest in a Wednesday hearing and set his bail at $15,000.
Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, a frequent critic of President Donald Trump, announced Tuesday that he will support a vote on his Supreme Court nominee this year — which could happen before the Nov. 3 presidential election.
“The Constitution gives the President the power to nominate and the Senate the authority to provide advice and consent on Supreme Court nominees. Accordingly, I intend to follow the Constitution and precedent in considering the President’s nominee. If the nominee reaches the Senate floor, I intend to vote based upon their qualifications,” he said in a statement.
President Donald Trump this week continued to minimize the severity of the coronavirus pandemic even as the United States surpassed the grim milestone of 200,000 reported deaths related to COVID-19.
Months after admitting to intentionally “playing it down” in order to avoid “panic,” Trump has bucked public health experts’ warnings about the virus at an increasing clip, repeating false and misleading statements about the pandemic as he fights for reelection.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday the announcement of his nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will likely be made at 5 p.m. EDT on Saturday.
“We’re getting very close to having a final decision made,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
He said the announcement will be “I believe at 5 o’clock on Saturday.”
Cindy McCain on Tuesday endorsed Democratic nominee Joe Biden for president, a stunning rebuke of President Donald Trump by the widow of the GOP’s 2008 nominee.
Trump has had a fraught relationship with members of John McCain’s family since he disparaged the Arizona senator during his 2016 campaign. But the McCains have stopped short of endorsing Trump’s rivals until now.
It’s been 160 years, almost to the day, since the last time American voters faced an election with consequences as grievous as this one. The 2020 contest is a referendum on Donald Trump’s fascist idiocracy and the rise of a tyrannical Putin-style kleptocracy. Here. In our time. This harrowing assessment includes the rise of an ideological Stone Age for the Supreme Court and, with it, the reversal of myriad advances in human rights and social programs, including the elimination of health insurance for millions of Americans and the dissolution of more than 500,000 marriages.
The too-soon death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has torn an opening in the fabric of the court that millions of socially Paleolithic conservatives have been waiting for: They now see the real potential for a 6-3 advantage.
Joe Biden would not say whether he opposes the mounting calls in his party to add more members to the U.S. Supreme Court in retaliation for Republicans filling a vacancy right before the presidential election.
Biden told a local Wisconsin TV station Monday that he wants to keep the focus on President Donald Trump and not get distracted by the issue of so-called court-packing, an idea the Democratic presidential nominee has opposed for years.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, the powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Monday that the Republican Party has the votes to confirm Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement on the Supreme Court before the Nov. 3 election.
“They tried to destroy Brett Kavanaugh so they could fill the seat,” Graham said Monday on Fox News, lambasting Democratic colleagues who have vowed to block any such nomination. “I’ve seen this movie before. It’s not going to work. … We’ve got the votes to confirm Justice Ginsburg’s replacement before the election, we’re going to move forward in the committee, we’re going to report the nomination out of the committee to the floor of the United States Senate so we can vote before the election.”
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Friday at 87, will be the first woman to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol, allowing mourners to come pay tribute to the trailblazing feminist litigator.
After civil rights legend Rosa Parks died in 2005, she lay in honor at the Capitol — a distinction given to private citizens, as opposed to government officials like Ginsburg. Ginsburg, who was the first Jewish woman on the Supreme Court, will also be the first Jewish person to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reversed an update made to its coronavirus guidance that stated COVID-19 is an airborne virus. The health agency said that update, posted to its website on Friday, was made in error.
“A draft version of proposed changes to these recommendations was posted in error to the agency’s official website,” the CDC said in a statement posted to its website on Monday. “CDC is currently updating its recommendations regarding airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19). Once this process has been completed, the update language will be posted.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death on Friday kicked off what is sure to be the most consequential Supreme Court confirmation fight in decades — and puts a spotlight on the handful of senators whose votes will determine the future of the court.
The universe of potential swing votes in the Senate is surprisingly small considering how high the stakes are. The following senators will be under enormous pressure — from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and President Donald Trump — to either fall in line, or break from their party in the most dramatic fashion.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi paid tribute to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Sunday, calling her a “powerful, brilliant brain on the court” in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” while refusing to take another impeachment inquiry off the table in order to block President Donald Trump’s upcoming nominee to the Supreme Court.
“We have our options. We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss right now but the fact is we have a big challenge in our country. This president has threatened to not even accept the results of the election,” Pelosi told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos. “Our main goal would be to protect the integrity of the election as we protect the people from the coronavirus.”
For decades, Republicans have galvanized voters around reshaping the Supreme Court, and they have benefited from it at the ballot box. But in a stark reversal, polls indicate that Democrats have the edge this year.
National and battleground state surveys taken before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday showed that voters trust Joe Biden more than President Donald Trump to pick a Supreme Court nominee and that Democrats rate the court as more important to their votes than Republicans do.
On Sunday, The New York Times released fresh polling data from four swing states. The results were so good for Democrat Joe Biden that his campaign may have allowed itself a cautious smile or two — Biden had huge lead in Minnesota, and was ahead in Wisconsin, Nevada, and New Hampshire. Accompanying the polling article, the Times published a political snapshot from each of those four states. But the snapshots read much differently than the polling results, as the Times seemed to lean hard into the idea that Biden was slumping.
“MINNESOTA: Some See an Edge for Trump,” read one headline. The Times interviewed just two people for the article and both thought Biden was facing trouble in Minnesota. Trump “looks stronger politically in the state than he did in 2016,” and Biden was “hardly a lock to carry the state,” the Times reported, even though the daily just found Biden’s lead to be nine points, seven weeks from Election Day.
Last night, right after I checked my phone after a joyful happy hour with friends on a rooftop bar, my buzz disappeared and I went immediately from chilled out to furnace-on-full-blast rage and gut-churning sadness about the death of Supreme Court Justice and genuine giant of American jurisprudence Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I thought about how I wanted to get on Twitter and savage anyone on the left who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I wanted to blame them for everything that will come from a Supreme Court that is firmly conservative. I wanted to go on a tear about people who didn’t vote at all, as well as those who voted Green Party. I was gonna get all righteous about it, telling everyone to fuck off who blamed Hillary Clinton as a candidate.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Friday night that he intends to allow for a floor vote in the Senate to confirm a new nominee made by President Donald Trump to replace the Supreme Court vacancy left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year,” he said.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice who was as pioneering as she was brash, died Friday, the high court said.
She was 87.
The court said Ginsburg, a lifelong champion of women’s rights and a fierce advocate for gender equality, died “surrounded by her family at her home in Washington, D.C., due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer.”
Chief Justice John Roberts said: “Our Nation has lost a jurist of historic stature. We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her — a tireless and resolute champion of justice.”
In an ad released on Thursday, a former senior adviser on the White House coronavirus task force lambasted President Donald Trump as a stonewalling, capricious leader with more concern for his reelection than the pandemic, and said she would be voting for his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, in November.
Olivia Troye, who worked as an adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security to Vice President Mike Pence before leaving the administration in August, appeared in an ad in which she shared damning anecdotes that portrayed Trump as a debilitating actor in the administration’s efforts to contain the virus. She said Trump was dismissive toward the task force’s efforts to prepare for the outbreak from early in the year, before the virus had made heavy inroads into the U.S.
The White House scrapped an effort to send hundreds of millions of cloth masks to every U.S. household in April, choosing instead to distribute the masks to nonprofit organizations and state and federal agencies, according to an internal email from a senior Trump administration official obtained by NBC News.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told NBC News that 600 million masks have been distributed around the country to nonprofits and state and federal agencies through the means the Trump administration ultimately chose. The mask distribution program was called Project America Strong.
Public health experts said sending masks directly to Americans’ homes in the early days of the global pandemic would have sent a stronger message encouraging Americans to wear masks.
A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked controversial Postal Service changes that have slowed mail nationwide, calling them “a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service” before the November election.
Judge Stanley Bastian in Yakima, Washington, said he was issuing a nationwide preliminary injunction sought by 14 states that sued the Trump administration and the U.S. Postal Service.
The states challenged the Postal Service’s so-called “leave behind” policy, where trucks have been leaving postal facilities on time regardless of whether there is more mail to load. They also sought to force the Postal Service to treat election mail as first class mail.
Joe Biden on Thursday went after President Donald Trump again and again over his handling of COVID-19, calling Trump’s downplaying of the pandemic “criminal” and his administration “totally irresponsible.”
“You’ve got to level with the American people — shoot from the shoulder. There’s not been a time they’ve not been able to step up. The president should step down,” the Democratic presidential nominee said to applause from a CNN drive-in town hall crowd in Moosic, outside his hometown of Scranton.
Speaking about Trump’s admission that he publicly played down the impact of the virus while aware of its severity, Biden declared: “He knew it and did nothing. It’s close to criminal.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden expressed his hope that the development and distribution of a vaccine for COVID-19 is free from political influence on Wednesday, asserting that while he places his trust in scientists, he cannot say the same for President Donald Trump.
“Let me be clear. I trust vaccines. I trust scientists. But I don’t trust Donald Trump. And at this moment, the American people can’t either,” Biden said in a speech delivered at a theater in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, after receiving a briefing from experts on the development of a vaccine for COVID-19, a virus that has thus far claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 Americans.
The top spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services is taking a leave of absence, the agency announced Wednesday, days after he promoted dangerous conspiracy theories during a Facebook Live video.
In the video, first reported by The New York Times, Michael Caputo, HHS’ assistant secretary for public affairs, charged that scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “don’t want America to get well.” He also urged supporters of President Donald Trump to load up on ammunition in preparation for a violent left-wing rebellion if the president wins re-election.
In scathing remarks against his own staff, Attorney General William Barr said Wednesday that the Justice Department has recently acted “more like a trade association for federal prosecutors than the administrator of a fair system of justice” and equated some prosecutors to preschoolers and “headhunters.”
Too much deference is given to career prosecutors, rather than to politically appointed leaders who can be held accountable at the ballot box, he said in remarks likely to further strain relationsbetween Barr and some of the Justice Department’s career prosecutors.
President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that a Covid-19 vaccinecould be ready for distribution as early as mid-October — hours after the head of the CDC testified it likely wouldn’t be ready until the end of the year and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden voiced concerns he was putting politics ahead of safety.
“We’re all set to distribute immediately. We are set to — it could be in October, or in November. It could be later than that, but I think it will be in October,” Trump told reporters in a news briefing, where he also said he thought a vaccine for the coronavirus would be ready in “mid-October.”
There are less than 60 days until many voters head to the polls to cast ballots for President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden — but some voters are still not committed to either candidate. In an ABC News town hall Tuesday, the president faced questions from some of those voters living in a critical battleground state: Pennsylvania.
The socially-distanced event was moderated by ABC News’ chief anchor, George Stephanopoulos, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia — a different setting than the president (who usually answers questions from the White House press corps and his favorite anchors at Fox News) is used to.
President Donald Trump has recently taken to calling for himself and Joe Biden to be drug-tested before they debate because Trump thinks that Biden is on some kind of performance-enhancing drug.
Trump used the same tactics against Hillary Clinton four years ago, and has been hammering away at it — saying on Fox News Tuesday morning that “a lot of people think that something happened” after Biden did better in his final debate with Bernie Sanders than during the first few debates.
President Donald Trump faced life outside his own political bubble on Tuesday, where his self-congratulation, buck passing and audacious falsehoods conspicuously failed to meet the moment when he was confronted by undecided voters.
President Donald Trump claimed on Tuesday to have “up-played” the threat of coronavirus early in the pandemic, contradicting his own remarks to the journalist Bob Woodward that he wanted to minimize the disease to avoid panic.
Speaking at an ABC News town hall moderated by George Stephanopoulos, Trump rebutted a student who asked why he had downplayed “a pandemic that is known to disproportionately harm low-income families and minority communities.” Trump defended his response to the health crisis by citing an early travel ban on foreign nationals from China from entering the U.S. in order to curb the spread of the virus.
Donald Trump appears to be seceding from the Union, which is bizarre given his status as the president of it. Make no mistake: Trump appears to be deliberately marginalizing himself by repeatedly insisting that he’s not responsible for certain states and cities, despite technically being the president of the entire United States.
We’ve all heard him say it. On topics ranging from poverty to crime to COVID-19, Trump never hesitates to defer all the blame for whatever onto state and local Democrats rather than acknowledging that he’s supposed to be the president of those cities and states, too.
The city of Louisville, Kentucky, has reached a settlement with Breonna Taylor’s family six months after she was killed in her homeduring a police drug raid.
A source familiar with the details of the settlement told NBC News the agreement is in the millions of dollars and will include a list of police reforms that will address officer accountability and the execution of search warrants.
The settlement was first reported by The Louisville Courier-Journal. Lawyers for Taylor’s family will discuss the settlement at a 2 p.m. ET news conference. A spokeswoman for Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer declined to comment Tuesday morning.
On August 14, the coronavirus pandemic was on fire in the US. More than 168,000 Americans had died, with more than 1,300 deaths that day alone. But when President Donald Trump called legendary journalist Bob Woodward, it was to find out one thing: He had recently learned that Woodward’s new book “Rage” was done and would be coming out in September, and Trump wanted to find out how he’d be portrayed.
Joe Biden’s economic proposals would create a faster growing economy, higher wages for American workers and reduce the debt compared to where the U.S. is headed under President Donald Trump, according to new analysis from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
That conclusion could give a further boost to the Democratic presidential candidate, who has generally led Mr. Trump in the polls but who often trails the president on the issue of the economy.
The Health and Human Services official who has been pressuring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change COVID-19 reports to reflect well on President Donald Trump has troubling Kremlin ties stretching for years.
Politico was the first to report last week that HHS Assistant Secretary Michael Caputo has been orchestrating a pressure campaign on the CDC to alter agency reports — and even stop them — to fit Trump’s far more optimistic view of COVID-19. The president himself admitted that he lied when he presented a sunnier view of the pandemic.
President Donald Trump touched down in California on Monday to survey the wildfire damage and immediately launched into his usual talking points about poor forest management while denying the role of climate change.
Trump arrived in Sacramento as more than two dozen major wildfires burned across the state. More than 2 million acres in the state have burned this year, a nearly 2,000% increase in land burned compared to this time last year.
At a roundtable discussion about the wildfires, California Secretary for Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot said Trump’s focus on forest management was obscuring the grim reality that climate change was behind the historically high temperatures and years of drought.
The most recent outrage against good government and common sense involves the technique most popular down at Camp Runamuck. If it’s not installing a useful tool at the U.S. Postal Service, it’s making sure a hopeless hack is in a position to barber the reports on the pandemic at the Centers for Disease Control. And what better time than right now, when the climate crisis is contributing not only to the torching of the western third of the country, but also to a view of the Atlantic and Caribbean in which hurricanes, both full and developing, are lined up like overseas flights arriving at JFK, to install at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration a guy who doesn’t believe in the climate crisis at all?
Hugh Jackman, Janelle Monáe, Regina King, Pose sensation and fashion trailblazer Billy Porter, groundbreaking trans actress Laverne Cox, Schitt’s Creek star Dan Levy and vaunted political satirist John Oliver are among the slew of actors, comics and performers lending cheer to GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics’ inaugural Dorians TV Toast 2020 on Revry, airing Sunday, September 13 on the first LGBTQ+ global streaming network Revry.
In the two-hour star-studded virtual event, hosted by famously opinionated entertainer and talk show host Karel, fans will find out which stars and TV shows the LGBTQ+ organization’s 270 members deemed the best, most visually stunning and even campiest of the past TV season. In addition to raising a glass to the honorees—many of whom delight in virtual acceptance videos—GALECA members discuss the nominees’ merits and even controversies (Randy Rainbow and Tiger King don’t get off lightly).
Days after the Commission on Presidential Debates announced its misguided decision to reward Fox News’ Chris Wallace with hosting duties for the first debate between Trump and Joe Biden this month, the GOP network proved once again why it has no business taking its place alongside legitimate news organizations. The debate prize comes as Fox News has spent summer weeks and months lying relentlessly about a public health crisis, and fueling racial hatred among its viewers. More recently, the network yet again proved why it should not be given the cover of a news outlet.
Sometimes, oh, my sweet, weary people of Donald Trump’s America, it feels like we’re sailing in skiffs on a sea of shit and some of us believe we can get across the shit sea to shore and some of us believe that we’re gonna sink but we all know we’re damned to keep sailing as wave after wave of shit keeps hitting us, and every time we dare to hope that we’ve seen the worst shit wave, that perhaps we’ll get a break and just sail as smoothly as possible through a shit sea, a fucking massive turd wave in a shit storm appears on the horizon and we’ve gotta batten down the hatches and ride this one out, even though we know that in the best possible circumstances, we’ll get over or through but still coated in shit.
President Donald Trump praised the killing of Michael Forest Reinoehl by a Department of Justice fugitive task force.
Hew was wanted for the fatal shooting of Aaron “Jay” Danielson, who was a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, which had organized a Trump caravan through Portland. Reinoehl had claimed the shooting was in self-defense.
COVID-19 is so-named because it first surfaced on the planet in 2019. It’s something that Republicans seem to be struggling to understand.
It was just a few months ago that senior White House counselor Kellyanne Conway claimed it wasn’t the first COVID, assuming that the 19 meant there were 18 versions of the virus before this one.
On Twitter Sunday, Republican Party chair Ronna Romney McDaniel blamed former Vice President Joe Biden for the virus, saying that Biden “can’t run from his disastrous record responding to the coronavirus.” The virus didn’t exist when Biden was in office, as it started in 2019.
Federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy, a top aide to U.S. Attorney John H. Durham in his Russia investigation, has quietly resigned – at least partly out of concern that the investigative team is being pressed for political reasons to produce a report before its work is done, colleagues said.
Health Department public affairs and former Trump campaign official Michael Caputo called pressure on scientists a defense against the “deep state.”
The Senate on Thursday voted 52-47 to block a $500 billion stimulus package proposed by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), likely ending hopes that such a deal might pass before the November election.
“My home state just passed a sad milestone yesterday,” McConnell said in a statement Thursday morning in which he called on Democrats to support his measure. “More than 1,000 Kentuckians have now lost their lives to COVID-19. These families I represent are not burying their loved ones because Republicans or Democrats are the enemy. They are burying their loved ones because of this virus. That’s what we are fighting.”
Russian military spies who hacked and leaked Democratic emails to inject chaos into the 2016 presidential election are active again, targeting political parties, advocacy groups and consultants, Microsoft announced Thursday.
China and Iran are also attempting to penetrate the Microsoft email accounts of people affiliated with the political campaigns, though the efforts against the campaigns of President Trump by Iran and the Democratic nominee Joe Biden by China were not successful, the firm said.
Paul Alexander, a Trump appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services, has been trying to prevent Anthony Fauci from talking about children wearing masks and getting COVID-19 tests, according to emails obtained by Politico.
Emails that Alexander sent to staff at the National Institutes of Health show that he has been trying to influence what Fauci should say during media interviews. His emails “often contradict mainstream science while promoting political positions taken by the Trump administration,” Politico reported.
Washington (CNN) — President Donald Trump admitted he knew weeks before the first confirmed US coronavirus death that the virus was dangerous, airborne, highly contagious and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” and that he repeatedly played it down publicly, according to legendary journalist Bob Woodward in his new book “Rage.”
“This is deadly stuff,” Trump told Woodward on February 7.
In a series of interviews with Woodward, Trump revealed that he had a surprising level of detail about the threat of the virus earlier than previously known. “Pretty amazing,” Trump told Woodward, adding that the coronavirus was maybe five times “more deadly” than the flu.
President Donald Trump has reportedly been weighing whether to invest up to $100 million of his own money in his 2020 reelection campaign.
Trump “has talked about the idea with multiple people, though he hasn’t yet committed to any self-funding,” according to a Tuesday report from Bloomberg.
The inevitable fallout from last month’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, an annual event that packed nearly 500,000 people into a small town in South Dakota, is becoming clear, and the emerging picture is grim.
According to a new study, which tracked anonymized cellphone data from the rally, over 250,000 coronavirus cases have now been tied to the 10-day event, one of the largest to be held since the start of the pandemic. It drew motorcycle enthusiasts from around the country, many of whom were seen without face coverings inside crowded bars, restaurants, and other indoor establishments.
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The Republican National Committee’s unprecedented — and possibly illegal — use of the White House for key events in last month’s convention has left Donald Trump’s campaign with unexpected costs after RNC attendees and heavy equipment damaged both the South Lawn and the newly-renovated Rose Garden.
According to the Washington Post, the convention exacted a noticeable toll on the White House grounds, requiring sections of the South Lawn to be re-sod and other repairs to account for foot traffic from more than a thousands Trump supporters and the large stage lights, scaffolding, and outdoor TV screens.
(CNN) — The US Justice Department, in an extraordinary move on Tuesday, asked to take over the defense of President Donald Trump in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll, a woman who has accused Trump of sexual assault.
While the alleged sexual assault occurred long before Trump became President, the Justice Department argued that it must take over because Trump’s comments spurring the defamation lawsuit came while he was in office.
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President Trump’s longtime lawyer and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, alleges in a new book that Trump made “overt and covert attempts to get Russia to interfere in the 2016 election” and that the future commander in chief was also well aware of Cohen’s hush-money payoff to adult-film star Stormy Daniels during that campaign.
“When we got our bonuses, let’s just say they were bigger, they exceeded expectations,” a former employee told The Washington Post.
While the president was out golfing, one of his campaign advisers made fun of the Democratic nominee for paying his respects after church on Sunday.
The most infuriating part of the soon-to-be-legendary story is what it says about the men who continued to serve this president*.
Five months ago, President Trump’s re-election campaign had a huge financial edge over Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s. The Times conducted an extensive review of how the Trump team spent lavishly to show how that advantage evaporated.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden thrust his campaign into the roiling national debate over police violence and racial justice on Thursday as he traveled to Kenosha, Wis., and pointedly embraced the nation’s racial reckoning, vowing improvements if elected president.
During an emotional meeting held in a church not far from looted downtown buildings, Biden made some of his most direct comments yet on the subject of race, growing introspective at times and speaking barely above a whisper. He said the shock over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, and the shooting that paralyzed Jacob Blake in Kenosha on Aug. 23, has provided the first window in generations for the nation to address centuries-old problems.
Infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci is getting the word out to Americans — especially those in seven central states — to be extra vigilant over the holiday weekend amid concerns about a spike in COVID-19 cases.
He warned that carelessness about the coronavirus could trigger a surge, similar to what happened after the Memorial Day holiday and the Fourth of July. That means staying away from crowded picnics, backyards and beaches. The fear is that Americans are tired of COVID-19 precautions and may risk an end-of-summer blowout.
“You don’t want to be someone who’s propagating the outbreak,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on the “Today” show. “You want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.”
President Donald Trump, who has been criticized in the past for making disparaging remarks about veterans and military families, reportedly referred to American service members who’d died in World War I as “losers” and “suckers” in conversations with his staff.
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, citing multiple anonymous sources who had firsthand knowledge of the conversations, reported Thursday on the president’s comments.
Associated Press reporter James LaPorta later corroborated Goldberg’s article, saying a senior Defense Department official had confirmed the information.
A COVID-19 vaccine could be available earlier than expected if ongoing clinical trials produce overwhelmingly positive results, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease official, in an interview Tuesday with KHN.
President Donald Trump posted a baffling tweet on Tuesday declaring that he has not had a series of “mini-strokes”— and had the White House physician release a statement backing up his claim, NBC News reports.
“It never ends! Now they are trying to say that your favorite President, me, went to Walter Reed Medical Center, having suffered a series of mini-strokes. Never happened to THIS candidate – FAKE NEWS,” Trump tweeted.
The tweet was followed hours later by a statement from White House physician Sean Conley, who said he was speaking out at Trump’s request. “I can confirm that President Trump has not experienced nor been evaluated for a cerebrovascular accident (stroke), transient ischemic attack (mini-stroke), or any acute cardiovascular emergencies, as have been incorrectly reported in the media,” Conley said.
Fox News aired the second part of President Donald Trump’s lengthy interview with Laura Ingraham on Tuesday and it was nearly as wild as the first one.
On Monday, Trump claimed “shadow” people were controlling former Vice President Joe Biden. He said the city of Portland, Oregon had been burning for decades (untrue). And he made unsubstantiated claims about airplanes “completely loaded with thugs” wearing dark uniforms and flying to disrupt the Republican National Convention.
In the sequel chat, Trump continued his attacks on Biden, but with a twist. In the past, he has repeatedly ― and without evidence ― claimed that Biden was “mentally shot.” Now, however, Trump claims Biden has a souped-up brain from some kind of drug.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday toured the site of a building that burned during the protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and met with local law enforcement officials, a trip meant to underscore his re-election argument that America is under a threat of being overtaken by violent mobs.
“To stop the political violence, we must also confront the radical ideology that includes this violence,” Trump said at a roundtable discussion on community safety. “Reckless far-left politicians continue to push the destructive message that our nation and our law enforcement are oppressive or racist.”
“Actually,” Trump continued, “we must give far great support to our law enforcement.”
The United States this week surpassed 6 million cases of COVID-19, the most in the world. Even when measuring relative to population, America’s standing is dismal and depressing. We’re currently ranked 10th in the world with 18,675 cases per million people, and growing by 30-50,000 new cases every day. As I begin to write this essay, midday on Monday, we’ve already racked up 14,151 cases for the day so far.
Just for the sake of contrast, Italy is ranked 60th in cases per million residents. France is ranked 63rd. Germany is 83rd. Iraq is ranked 49th. Canada is 76th. Again, the U.S. is ranked 10th. There are “shithole countries,” as Trump called them, who are faring better than we are.
Vice President Mike Pence was put on standby to temporarily assume the powers of the presidency during President Donald Trump’s unannounced visit to Walter Reed hospital in November 2019, according to a copy of New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt’s forthcoming book obtained by CNN.
President Donald Trump alleged unnamed people in “dark shadows” are controlling Democratic nominee Joe Biden in an interview with Laura Ingraham that aired Monday night on Fox News.
In discussing what he characterized as anarchists and thugs terrorizing American cities, Trump said, “People that you’ve never heard of, people that are in the dark shadows” are pulling the strings of the Democratic nominee.
Thus did Joe Biden bring forward the only question that really matters in this election on Monday in a speech from a suburb of Pittsburgh. It was a good, thwacking indictment of a criminal and incompetent presidency*. It got Biden out in public again, which needed to happen. And if all he did was ask that question, it still would have been all of those things. Thus did Joe Biden put the responsibility right where it belongs: on the voters of the United States of America.
Are you satisfied with four more years of an unfunny burlesque of American government, with the reins of power in the hands of a foreign-owned vulgar talking yam, with another term of chaos, misrule, and kleptocratic vandalism, and with a final transition of the old republic into an incoherent ball of angry snakes?
President Donald Trump defended his decision to visit Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, despite calls from local leaders that he stay away from the state amid fears that the trip will only inflame tensions in the city.
The president said Monday that he would go to the region, even though he was unwelcome, in his latest effort to cast himself as the “law-and-order” president going into the November election. The White House has said he will use the visit to support local law enforcement and “survey” damage after anti-racist demonstrations, but the move mirrors his administration’s efforts to cast such protests as violent riots rather than calls for change.
The nation’s top intelligence official has informed Congress that his office will no longer give in-person election security briefings on Capitol Hill, a move that raised concern among lawmakers Saturday about the public’s right to know about foreign interference in the upcoming presidential election.
President Donald Trump said National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe made the decision because the administration “got tired” of intelligence about election security leaking from Congress.
“They leaked the information … and what’s even worse, they leaked the wrong information and we got tired of it,” Trump told reporters while attending a briefing on Hurricane Laura in Orange, Texas. He didn’t offer details to support his statement.
The U.S. has surpassed 6 million coronavirus cases as the country struggles to reopen schools and rebuild its economy as the pandemic rages with no end in sight.
The number of coronavirus cases topped 6 million Sunday, according to NBC News data collected from health departments nationwide. The country has recorded more than 183,000 deaths due to the virus since the outbreak gained global attention in February.
Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, blasted President Donald Trump as having “recklessly” encouraged violence after a man died following clashes Saturday in Portland, Oregon, between people attending a pro-Trump vehicle rally and Black Lives Matter protesters.
In a long statement Sunday afternoon, Biden called “the deadly violence” in Portland “unacceptable” and said he condemns “violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right.”
President Trump faces incoming fire from three different directions in his native New York, and his odds of escaping unscathed look long.
We’ve known for a while about the Manhattan district attorney’s dogged pursuit of the president’s tax records. That odyssey is poised to end soon and probably successfully for the D.A., at least in terms of obtaining the records.
Then last week, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York indicted erstwhile Trump guru Stephen K. Bannon on criminal charges. If Bannon cooperates with authorities, he might well have vivid stories to tell about Trump and his circle.
Read the rest of Harry Litman’s piece at The Los Angeles Times
One of President Donald Trump’s ultimate tells is the phrase “as you know.” Whenever Trump says something and follows it with “as you know,” it’s got one of two purposes. The first is flattery, as in, “I know that you are privy to this incredible insight that I have, too.” The second is conspiratorial, making you complicit in his lies. If he says something absurdly false and adds “as you know,” barring anyone shouting out, “No, I don’t fucking know,” he’s essentially acting as if you have assented to the lies.
For the idiot hordes of his voters, it doesn’t matter. For the rest of us, it should be alarming. Trump could say, “I strangle hobos with Ivanka’s panties and lean in to kiss them as they take their last breath because it’s the only thing that makes me ejaculate, as you know.” We might raise a hand and say, “I’m sorry. Could you go back to that strangling part? We didn’t really know that.” Trump voters would nod and say, “Yes, of course, we know about the hobogasm. Do continue,” and then, when Democrats started to complain about the president jizzing on hobo corpses, they’d get outraged and tell us, “Look, we all know that’s who he is. We don’t care.”
A 17-year-old accused of killing two protesters and injuring another with an AR-15-style rifle in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday night has been charged as an adult with two counts of first degree homicide and one count of attempted homicide. The teen, Kyle Rittenhouse, also faces charges of recklessly endangering the safety of two other victims and possessing a weapon while under the age of 18.
In a complaint released Thursday by the Kenosha County Clerk of Courts, investigators identified the deceased victims as Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. A third victim who survived being shot is identified as Gaige Grosskreutz. The shootings happened amid the third night of demonstrations over the Sunday police shooting of Jacob Blake.
Repeat after me: Bright green clothing is not safe for the internet.
First lady Melania Trump learned that the hard way when she wore a lime green dress to the closing night of the Republican National Convention, which was held, in an unprecedented move, on the White House South Lawn Thursday.
The moment she emerged from the building, internet pranksters knew they had their work cut out for them.
Critics slammed President Donald Trump’s use of the White House for a political stunt on Thursday as both unethical and illegal.
Trump spoke to a crowd on the South Lawn as he accepted his party’s nomination at the Republican National Convention, one of several purely political events done on government property lately.
Earlier this week, Trump turned a naturalization ceremony at the White House into a televised spectacle during the RNC. And on Thursday, for Trump’s speech, the White House was festooned with campaign signs and logos.
President Donald Trump capped the Republican National Convention on Thursday with an ominous speech warning of an end to American exceptionalism in an effort to unite the fervent base that helped propel him to victory four years ago.
“Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists, agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens,” Trump said, calling his competitor, former Vice President Joe Biden, a “Trojan horse” for socialism.
“Joe Biden is not a savior of America’s soul ― he is the destroyer of America’s jobs. And if given the chance, he will be the destroyer of American greatness,” he said.
The videos that spread rapidly across social media Tuesday evening all showed a similar figure: a white man of medium build, a backward tan cap, an olive green T-shirt, dark pants, blue gloves, a rifle and a side bag.
“I’m Kyle, by the way,” the man says in one video.
That man now appears to be Kyle Rittenhouse, according to numerous videos from Tuesday night posted online and a Facebook account with pictures that match the man in the video. On Wednesday, Rittenhouse, 17, of Antioch, Illinois, was arrested and faces a warrant alleging first-degree intentional homicide in connection with the shooting deaths of two people during protests over the shooting by police of Jacob Blake, a Black man, in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Professional basketball, baseball and soccer teams postponed their games Wednesday after the Milwaukee Bucks didn’t take the floor during a playoff match in a protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin.
Top-ranked pro-tennis player Naomi Osaka also said she would sit out a semi-final match at the Western Southern Open scheduled for Thursday.
“Before I am a athlete, I am a Black woman,” she said in a statement. “And as a Black woman I feel as though there are much more important matters at hand.”
Hurricane Laura made landfall in Louisiana early Thursday as a strong Category 4 storm, bringing maximum winds of 150 mph and dire warnings of extensive damage.
The National Hurricane Center described the hurricane as “extremely dangerous” as it moved across the state, warning of catastrophic storm surges, extreme winds and flash flooding across portions of low-lying Louisiana.
“Doppler radar images indicate that the eye of Hurricane Laura has made landfall at the coast near Cameron, Louisiana,” the agency said, noting the storm would likely move inland over southwest Louisiana and Arkansas later Thursday evening.
Republicans leaned into President Donald Trump’s “law and order” message on the third night of their party convention Wednesday. But with no substantive mentions of the unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the night felt very separated from the moment.
Before the Republican National Convention kicked off for the night, the country was in severe turmoil stemming from the Kenosha police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man. An apparent white vigilante was arrested for murder hours before the convention began for allegedly shooting three protesters, two of whom died. The NBA and WNBA shut down for the evening as players demanded action to end police violence; several MLB and Major League Soccer games were canceled for the same reason.
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.
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.
Two people are dead and a third was injured in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following a shooting late Tuesday night, police said.
On the second night of the Republican National Convention, several members of the Trump family made the case for President Donald Trump’s re-election in a program devoted to cultural flashpoints and dire predictions for the country under a Joe Biden administration.
The president’s son Eric Trump offered a number of false or misleading claims about Biden’s views and policy prescriptions, while top Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow got the facts wrong about the trajectory of the economy when the president took office. First lady Melania Trump, meanwhile, delivered a keynote address from the Rose Garden at the White House, while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a norm-defying speech recorded in Jerusalem.
In keeping with the neck-snapping pace of the news these days, several breaking stories happened all at once Monday morning.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified before the House Oversight Committee, repeatedly declaring that he would not reverse the sabotage he imposed on the Postal Service mid-pandemic, and with a presidential election 70 days away. Donald Trump tried to disrupt the hearings by jumping into an amped-up airing of grievances during the opening proceedings of the Republican convention, splitting cable news screens into two levels of Dante’s hell. Meanwhile, a former business partner of Jerry Falwell Jr. accused the Liberty University evangelist of being a willing cuckold in a love triangle. Practically buried under everything else was word that the Trump administration will not comply with the Supreme Court’s order to resume accepting new applicants into the DACA program.
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.
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.
“Rioters must not be allowed to destroy our cities. Human, sex, drug traffickers should not be allowed to cross our border.”
“People of faith are under attack.”
“Look at what’s happening in America’s cities ― all run by Democrats. Crime, violence, mob rule. Democrats refuse to denounce the mob.”
Those were all comments from speakers on Monday, the opening night of the Republican National Convention, which GOP aides had promised would be “very optimistic and upbeat.”
Prior to embarking on his new career as an alleged pirate king of the bounding main, Steve Bannon used to talk bullishly about destroying the “administrative state.” Recently, there have been two epic reported stories that went spelunking into what that actually means. First, the good people at ProPublica went deeply into the history of how the meatpacking industry blew off a decade’s worth of warnings that, in the event of a pandemic, their facilities would convert themselves into thriving germ factories.
The Republican National Convention is set to begin this week, on the heels of Democrats’ convention in which they nominated former Vice President Joe Biden to be their party’s presidential candidate.
Similar to the Democratic National Convention, the RNC will conduct most of its events and speeches virtually and remotely, with the exception of convention business in the host city of Charlotte, North Carolina. The RNC is expected to renominate President Donald Trump, who plans to deliver his address from Washington, D.C.
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.”
Kellyanne Conway, the longtime adviser to President Donald Trump and wife of outspoken Trump critic George Conway, is leaving the White House at the end of August, she said in a statement Sunday.
Conway, who was Trump’s campaign manager before she became one of his staunchest defenders in the White House, said that she and her husband disagreed about plenty but “we are united on what matters most: the kids,” she said.
“Our four children are teens and ‘tweens starting a new academic year, in middle school and high school, remotely from home for at least a few months,” Conway said. “As millions of parents nationwide know, kids ‘doing school from home’ requires a level of attention and vigilance that is as unusual as these times.”
Confirming the disloyal ways of Trump’s 2016 campaign, the Senate Intelligence Committee released more bipartisan findings on Tuesday, reporting that the GOP election team worked closely with Russian operatives. Trump then lied about those contacts to Robert Mueller’s investigators.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the 2016 hacking of Democratic Party accounts and the release of emails intended to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Bloomberg reported. “Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.” The report contains dozens of new findings that show a direct link between Trump associates and Russian intelligence.
Everyone is talking about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s speeches at the Democratic National Convention this past week as being a return of empathy or decency, but I’d go one further with another overarching theme: “Remember sanity?” It was truly like watching a funhouse mirror version of our reality, except it took the warped world around us and made it look natural again. It was honestly like you could exhale and not just wonder what insane shit might follow after the last round of insane shit.
That was what Biden and Harris imparted: a sense that we could possibly exist in a normal nation, one that wasn’t constantly on the brink of exploding in violence or just collapsing into itself, unable to bear the weight of one man’s insatiable ego. Harris vividly described our national anxiety: “We’re at an inflection point. The constant chaos leaves us adrift. The incompetence makes us feel afraid. The callousness makes us feel alone. It’s a lot.” Then she went full inspirational speaker: “And here’s the thing: We can do better and deserve so much more.”
President Donald Trump’s sister was recorded saying that her brother “has no principles” and “you can’t trust him,” The Washington Post reported Saturday.
Maryanne Trump Barry, who was serving as a federal judge at the time, made the slashing comments to her niece Mary Trump, who was secretly recording her, the Post reported. At one point, Barry was discussing Trump’s moves in 2018 to separate immigrant children from their parents.
“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean, my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people — not do this.”
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.
The investigation is looking into bank and tax fraud, according to previous court filings.
President Donald Trump expanded his “birther” conspiracy theories on Thursday to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, telling a crowd in Pennsylvania that Biden “wasn’t born” in the state because he moved to Delaware with his family when he was a child.
“He’d say he was born here,” Trump told listeners in Scranton. “But he left when he was like 8, 9 or 10. So he left 68 years ago, he left — a long time ago. So I view it differently. He wasn’t born here. He abandoned Scranton!”
Joe Biden officially accepted the Democratic nomination for president on the final night of the party’s virtual convention on Thursday. As he accepted the honor, Biden promised to work hard for everyone, including people who didn’t vote for him.
“While I’ll be a Democratic candidate, I will be an American president,” Biden said in his remarks. “I’ll work hard for those who didn’t support me, as hard for them as I did for those who did vote for me.”
The former vice president said that President Donald Trump has “cloaked America in darkness for much too long.”
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.
Nearly 7 in 10 Americans say the US response to the coronavirus outbreak makes them feel embarrassed, according to a new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS, as 62% of the public says President Donald Trump could be doing more to fight the outbreak.
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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?”
Sen. Kamala Harris of California officially became the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee Wednesday night, making history as the first Black woman and Asian American on a major party’s presidential ticket.
Harris, the child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, accepted her party’s nomination with a blistering speech that capped a star-studded night of programming on Night 3 of the virtual Democratic National Convention, during which former President Barack Obama attacked his successor with unusual force.
In an impassioned live speech from Joe Biden’s hometown, Wilmington, Delaware, Harris took stark aim at President Donald Trump, too, painting him as an incompetent chaos creator — all while deftly weaving in details from her barrier-breaking biography.
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.
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.”
Former presidents, ex-secretaries of state and a New York elevator operator provided some of the high points of Tuesday’s second night of the Democratic National Convention — but it was Jill Biden who stole the show.
Here are some of the most notable moments from Night 2:
Speaking from the high school where she used to teach, Jill Biden closed the night by talking about her relationship with Joe Biden and the pain they’ve shared over the years.
“How do you make a broken family whole? The same way you make a nation whole: with love and understanding and with small acts of kindness,” she said. Her husband joined her in the classroom at the end of the speech.
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.
Donald Trump is practically daring us to nab him in the act. That’s how obvious and unequivocal his latest conspiracy to cheat in the 2020 election happens to be. We all see it happening, we know what he’s doing and we know exactly why. The crisis is so urgent that it requires us to compile, step-by-step, a complete picture of his plot to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service and, with it, the election. That’s what I’d like to do here today, so let’s get started.
Michael Cohen, in the foreword to his memoir about his time as a fixer for Trump, repeated what he testified under oath to the House Oversight Committee last year: Trump will do anything to win, and possesses “the desire for power at all costs.” Cohen added, “I became even more convinced that Trump will never leave office peacefully.” And the president’s paranoia and rank ignorance when it comes to American government is fully embodied in this sentence: “He thinks everyone is as corrupt and shameless and ruthless as he is.”
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.
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.”
There were 35,112 new cases of COVID-19 identified in the United States on Monday, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University.
It’s the first time since June 28 that the country has reported under 40,000 new cases in a single day. Monday’s case count is also well below the record set on July 16, when more than 77,000 new cases were identified in a 24-hour reporting period.
Michelle Obama delivered a scathing indictment of President Donald Trump’s policies and character Monday on the first night of the all-virtual Democratic National Convention, accusing the White House of sowing “chaos” and “division” and showing a “total and utter lack of empathy.”
Coming at the end of a jam-packed two-hour program that tackled the coronavirus crisis, racial justice and the nation’s economic woes, Obama began by acknowledging Americans’ weariness with the current state of affairs.
“I know a lot of folks are reluctant to tune into a political convention right now or to politics in general. Believe me, I get that,” she said. “You know I hate politics.”
In 1996, the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention said the following about the incumbent Democratic president.
“Now, think about Bill Clinton. He promises one thing and does another. He hopes we’ll forget his broken promises. But I ask you — have you forgotten that Bill Clinton promised a middle class tax cut, then passed the largest tax increase in American history? I didn’t think so. Have you forgotten that Bill Clinton promised common-sense health care reform, only to impose a huge Washington-run bureaucracy health care system on all of us? And have you forgotten that Bill Clinton promised to balance the budget, first in five years, then 10, then seven, then nine, then went on to veto the first balanced budget in 25 years? Americans know that Bill Clinton’s promises have the lifespan of a Big Mac on Air Force One.”
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).
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday the chamber will return from its vacation early to vote on legislation meant to limit changes to the Postal Service ahead of the presidential election in November.
The California Democrat said she would call on the House to return to the Capitol in the coming days.
“Lives, livelihoods and the life of our American Democracy are under threat from the President,” Pelosi wrote in a letter to colleagues. “That is why I am calling upon the House to return to session later this week to vote on Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman [Carolyn B.] Maloney’s ‘Delivering for America Act,’ which prohibits the Postal Service from implementing any changes to operations or level of service it had in place on January 1, 2020.”
The Democratic National Committee’s presidential nominating convention kicks off Monday after the coronavirus pandemic caused significant delays and changes in the schedule.
While the host city for the convention was set to be Milwaukee, former Vice President Joe Biden is expected to accept the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination from his home in Delaware due to the virus. The presumptive nominee announced Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) last Tuesday as his choice for vice president after a drawn-out vetting process that included many women of color and prominent political leaders.
The historic ticket is moving forward on the campaign message that President Donald Trump is a purveyor of crisis, with Harris calling 2020 a moment of “real consequence for America.”
Taking their cues from Trump and dropping any pretense of not being blatantly sexist and racist, the right-wing media immediately dove into a feeding trough of ugly rhetoric this week when Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate. The conservative media machine set off allegorical bomb blasts around Harris, frantically trying to depict as radical and dangerous a mainstream U.S. senator from the largest state in the union.
“In style and policy, Harris epitomizes an authoritarian,” the National Review gasped. The far-right Federalist warned panicked readers that Harris, a former prosecutor, represents a “radical threat to America.” And Fox News’ Sean Hannity announced the Biden-Harris ticket was “the most radical ticket of a political party in our lifetime by far.”
Read the rest of Eric Boehlert’s piece and subscribe to his newsletter at PressRun Media.
Last week, I said on Twitter that I wanted Sen. Kamala Harris to be Joe Biden’s pick for a running mate because I wanted her out there for the next couple of months prosecuting Donald Trump’s administration in the public space. Several responses were along the lines of “No, fuck you, she should be attorney general, dick, so that my favorite Democrat can be VP!”
There are a few reasons I thought Harris-as-AG was a dumb idea. First, no Attorney General has ever gone on to become president. (Robert Kennedy may have, but, well, we’ll never know.) And Harris obviously is eyeing the presidency down the road. More importantly, though, is that, as Biden’s vice presidential nominee, she will have an incredibly high profile, and in a media environment that too often ignores Democrats and especially Democratic women, she can go out every day and make Donald Trump and Mike Pence cry and it will have to be covered. That will shake some shit up.
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.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democratic leaders are considering cutting short the August recess and bringing the chamber back into session to deal with the unfolding crisis at the U.S. Postal Service, according to Democratic sources.
The House could return to vote with the next two weeks, the Democratic sources suggested. The chamber is currently in recess, with no votes scheduled until the week of Sept. 14.
Pelosi and other top Democrats, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), discussed the possibility of returning early during an emergency leadership call Saturday afternoon.
President Donald Trump, who earlier amplified a racist conspiracy theory about Sen. Kamala Harris’ citizenship, refused Saturday to say whether the California-born senator was eligible to become vice president.
Pressed by a reporter to answer a question on the topic, Trump said only that it was “not something that bothers me.”
“I have nothing to do with that,” he said on whether Harris — a natural-born U.S. citizen with immigrant parents from Jamaica and India — should be allowed to run for vice president.
The novel coronavirus has now killed more than 753,000 people worldwide.
Over 20.7 million people across the globe have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new respiratory virus, according to data compiled 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 national governments are hiding or downplaying the scope of their outbreaks.
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.
Former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris are calling for a three-month nationwide mask mandate to limit the spread of coronavirus.
During a briefing by public health experts in Wilmington, Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, told reporters that all the nation’s governors should require this.
“Every single American should be wearing a mask when they’re outside for the next three months, at a minimum. Every governor should mandate mandatory mask-wearing,” Biden said, suggesting that widespread mask use could save 40,000 lives over the next three months. “Let’s institute a mask mandate nationwide starting immediately, and we will save lives.”
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.”
The novel coronavirus has now killed more than 749,000 people worldwide.
Over 20.6 million people across the globe have been diagnosed with COVID-19, the disease caused by the new respiratory virus, according to data compiled 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 national governments are hiding or downplaying the scope of their outbreaks.
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.
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.
Former Vice President Joe Biden described Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., as “experienced,” a “proven fighter” and ready to handle the presidency on day one of a Biden administration in their first joint appearance as a presidential ticket in Wilmington, Delaware, Wednesday evening.
Introducing Harris, Biden praised the senator’s bonafides and took aim at President Donald Trump a day after the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee announced his selection of Harrisas his running mate.
Biden said Harris “knows how to govern, she knows how to make the hard calls” and is “ready to do this job” from the onset.
As Donald Trump keeps calling for the nation’s 124,000 public and private schools to reopen, even as he’s failed to contain COVID-19, we are about to embark on a massive, poorly controlled national experiment with the subjects being most of the nation’s 55 million school-age children, their families and their teachers.
Unfortunately, this may not go well—which helps explain why New York City is one of the few major school districts planning to open school buildings to students in September, and only on a staggered basis—and we could be facing a significant upsurge in COVID-19 cases, including in states where the outbreak seems, at the moment, relatively under control.
Read the rest of Dr. Irwin Redlener’s piece at The Daily Beast
By Tuesday, senior White House officials were saying publicly that the maneuver only guarantees an extra $300 per week for unemployed Americans — with states not required to add anything to their existing state benefit programs to qualify for the federal benefit.
The Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences on Tuesday canceled their football seasons over coronavirus concerns, ignoring pleas from President Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers and college athletes to play in the fall.
College football has become a flashpoint in the fight over reopening the country, with government officials using the sport as a tool to encourage public compliance with health protocols. The president inserted himself into the debate this week and urged schools to let their athletes play.
Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, a member of the progressive “Squad” in Congress, defeated a well-funded challenger in a Minnesota Democratic primary on Tuesday, CNN projected.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. selected Senator Kamala Harris of California as his vice-presidential running mate on Tuesday, embracing a former rival who sharply criticized him in the Democratic primaries but emerged after ending her campaign as a vocal supporter of Mr. Biden’s and a prominent advocate of racial-justice legislation after the killing of George Floyd in late May.
Ms. Harris, 55, is the first Black woman and the first person of Indian descent to be nominated for national office by a major party, and only the fourth woman in U.S. history to be chosen for a presidential ticket. She brings to the race a far more vigorous campaign style than Mr. Biden’s, including a gift for capturing moments of raw political electricity on the debate stage and elsewhere, and a personal identity and family story that many find inspiring.
It’s quite likely that Donald Trump was unaware that payroll taxes are how the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are bankrolled. He might also be unaware that current Social Security checks to seniors are derived from payroll taxes — not those paid into the system when today’s recipients were working, but the ones being paid in, right now, by today’s workers.
Either Trump doesn’t know how the programs work or he’s deliberately attempting to use executive orders to kill both programs, in accordance with the decades-long conservative crusade to drown them in the bathtub, leaving current and pending retirees without the benefits they’re expecting.
As the nation focuses on safety issues around going back to school during the pandemic, a new report found a sharp increase in the number of Covid-19 cases among children in the United States.
Russia on Tuesday became the first country to officially register a coronavirus vaccine and declare it ready for use, despite international skepticism. President Vladimir Putin said that one of his daughters has already been inoculated.
Putin emphasized that the vaccine underwent the necessary tests and has proven efficient, offering a lasting immunity from the coronavirus. However, scientists at home and abroad have been sounding the alarm that the rush to start using the vaccine before Phase 3 trials — which normally last for months and involve thousands of people — could backfire.
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.
The New York Times went long on the current Republican-generated congressional stalemate regarding the next relief bill aimed at mitigating the combined effects of the pandemic and the spiraling national economy. The general tone of the piece is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is taking no mess in her negotiations with the other side, which is true enough, I guess, but hardly a surprise. A House relief bill has been idling in the Senate for months because Mitch McConnell’s majority in that chamber is so riven with disagreement as to be effectively useless.
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.
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.
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.
The United States on Sunday surpassed 5 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. has both the highest number of confirmed cases and the most deaths of any country in the world.
The total number of confirmed cases throughout the world is nearly 20 million, meaning the U.S. accounts for roughly 25% of all cases worldwide despite only having around 4% of the global population. More than 162,000 people in the U.S. have died of complications due to COVID-19.
Just because Trump is the Republican Party’s nominee for president, doesn’t mean he deserves to debate his Democratic opponent on national television.
For now, Joe Biden has committed to participating in the three scheduled presidential debates. I wish he would take a different path and tell Trump that if he doesn’t release his tax returns there will be no two-man debates. Trump’s ongoing refusal to be transparent about his financial past ought to forfeit him the right to participate in the nationally televised forums. And Biden would be on solid ground making that stand.
Everyone’s got their line that pushed them over the edge from President Donald Trump’s interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios (motto: “When USA Today is too complex, you’ve got Axios”). Mine occurred when Swan asked Trump about why he didn’t bother to ask Russian dictator Vladimir Putin about the reports that Putin had put a bounty on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan. Trump could have shimmied his hands around as he answered, “Well, he’s my dom and when master tells me not to ask questions, I can’t ask questions or he spanks my ass with the splintery switch.” That would have made sense. I could have thought, “Well, I guess he’s gotta do what a sub’s gotta do. No one wants splinters in their ass. I assume. Better google that later.” (Note: Of course there are people who want splinters in their ass.)
Nearly 300,000 Americans could be dead from COVID-19 by Dec. 1, University of Washington health experts forecast on Thursday, although they said 70,000 lives could be saved if people were scrupulous about wearing masks.
The latest predictions from the university’s widely cited Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) comes as top White House infectious disease advisers warned that major U.S. cities could erupt as new coronavirus hot spots if officials there were not vigilant with counter-measures.
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.
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.”
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.”
White House officials told Senate Republicans on Wednesday that if a deal is not reached with Democrats on coronavirus relief by Friday, negotiations will likely stop.
“I think at this point we’re either going to get serious about negotiating and get an agreement in principle,” Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told reporters Wednesday. “I’ve become extremely doubtful that we’ll be able to make a deal if it goes well beyond Friday.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer snapped back at Meadows’ remark, following another day of negotiations between the parties, saying that Democrats would not be the ones to leave negotiations.
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.
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.”
The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the state of Nevada over its plan to send absentee ballots to all active voters this November in a major expansion of mail-in voting in the battleground state.
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.
President Donald Trump once again pushed back against statistics showing an uptick in coronavirus death rates in the United States during an interview with Axios that aired Monday.
The president sat down for a sweeping interview with the outlet’s Jonathan Swan on July 28. Swan pressed Trump on figures that showed a recent dramatic rise in the daily death toll linked to cases of COVID-19.
From the beginning of their discussion, the president tried to downplay the number of American deaths. After talking about his television ratings and campaign rallies, Trump said he thinks the coronavirus pandemic is under control.
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.
In a time of instability and uncertainty, there’s one thing we can count on: Donald Trump will do everything he possibly can to retain power through the forthcoming election and beyond. His motives are well-known: If he loses the election, he’ll not only go down in history as a one-term loser, which is anathema to his ridiculously hyperbolic puffery, but it’s likely he’ll face indictment on myriad criminal charges, while fighting off an avalanche of lawsuits aimed at his criminal negligence.
How do we know he’s capable of anything? For starters, he already tried to cheat in this election. He was impeached and put on trial in the Senate for doing it. Before that, he tried to cheat in the 2016 election, too, with the help of Russia and his then-lawyer Michael Cohen, who funneled campaign cash to buy the silence of women Trump awkwardly screwed while married. If he’s willing to risk impeachment and other ramifications in order to suppress the vote, there’s definitely no off-position on his self-destruction switch.
After a week of tributes and mourning for Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), President Donald Trump declined to offer any praise for the late civil rights icon and instead bemoaned the fact that he “didn’t come to my inauguration.”
In an interview with Axios that aired Monday, Trump was asked how he thinks history will remember Lewis.
“I don’t know,” Trump said. “I don’t know John Lewis. He chose not to come to my inauguration. I never met John Lewis, actually, I don’t believe.”
The Census Bureau will end its counting efforts for the 2020 census on Sept. 30, a month earlier than planned, the bureau’s director announced Monday.
The bureau had expected to continue field data collection, which includes door-knocking, phone calls and online responses, until Oct. 31. The date had been pushed back from a July 31 deadline after the coronavirus pandemic complicated field operations.
To help meet the earlier deadline, the bureau will include “enumerator awards and the hiring of more employees to accelerate the completion of data collection and apportionment counts by our statutory deadline of December 31, 2020, as required by law and directed by the Secretary of Commerce,” Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham said in a statement.
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.
Attorneys for Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance argued Monday that President Donald Trump should be forced to comply with a subpoena for his tax documents — and suggested that his company was under investigation for alleged insurance and bank fraud.
The disclosure in a federal court filing adds a new dimension to the battle over the president’s financial records.
Vance’s office subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, in 2019 as part of an investigation into the Trump Organization about payments made to two women who have alleged affairs with the president, which he has denied. But the latest filing suggests Vance’s probe extends beyond the hush-money payments.
No, goddammit, Washington Post, Enough of this nonsense. “Congress” is not flailing. The Republican majority in the Senate is flailing, because the Republican majority is made up of Republicans, and the Republican Party is made up of hyper-ambitious lunatics. It’s not “Congress” that’s stiffing the millions of Americans who need relief in this perilous time of tangled national emergencies that are feeding off each other. It’s the Republicans. Why is that so hard to say?
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.
House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Sunday said she does not have confidence in White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Deborah Birx, after reportedly bashing her during a closed-door meeting earlier this week.
On ABC News’ “This Week,” host Martha Raddatz asked Pelosi about a Politico article from Friday, which reported that Pelosi had accused Birx of spreading disinformation about the pandemic.
“Do you have confidence in her?” Raddatz asked.
“I think [President Donald Trump] is spreading disinformation about the virus and she is his appointee,” Pelosi said. “So I don’t have confidence there, no.”
“The Ebola crisis in the United States has become an anchor threatening to sink the Obama presidency” — The Hill, October 16, 2014.
Appearing on CNN last week, Washington Post reporter Abby Phillip expressed bewilderment that Trump was using his Twitter feed to spread wildly dangerous misinformation about the GOP’s supposed miracle cure for Covid-19. Trump has been doing this for months, purposefully contradicting established science and willfully endangering Americans, especially conspiratorial-minded ones who listen to Trump’s unscientific rants. “I think we really do have to say, what’s going on in terms of the president’s Twitter feed last night is irresponsible,” Phillip stressed. “At this point, it’s on the verge of putting people in danger.”
There is a tone that Barack Obama has whenever he’s talking about something where you know he’s thinking, “This is so damn obvious that I can’t believe I have to say it out loud.” It’s a mixture of incredulity that people (generally Republicans and Fox “news” viewers) could be so fuckin’ stupid and disappointment that he has to say something that’s been said a million times before. But it’s also got an air of optimism behind it, that maybe it needs to be said over and over and this is just the burden we all bear. Yeah, that’s it. That’s the tone, and, goddamn, I’ve missed it.
Former President Obama’s eulogy at the funeral of Rep. John Lewis, one of the titans of the civil rights movement, was blissfully political. It was refreshingly confrontational. And it was in the spirit of Lewis’s entire life, as Obama well-knew. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if Lewis had asked Obama to bring the fire to his funeral, especially since it was held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King had been pastor until his murder in 1968. What a better place and what a better time for Obama the fighter to finally, fully re-emerge. We missed you, man, and, holy shit, we need you.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Saturday evening that discussions between congressional leadership and the White House were “productive,” but added “no agreement can be reached yet” on another coronavirus relief package. She said staffers will continue discussions on Saturday.
Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer met with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnunchin Saturday.
Schumer had said Saturday morning that they were “not close yet” to a deal.
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.”
The vote to renominate President Donald Trump is set to be conducted in private later this month, without members of the press present, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Convention, citing the coronavirus.
While Trump called off the public components of the convention in Florida last month, citing spiking cases of the virus across the country, 336 delegates are scheduled to gather in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Aug. 24 to formally vote to make Trump the GOP standard-bearer once more.
Hundreds of pages of court documents involving British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein’s who has been accused of enabling the late financier’s sexual abuse of underage girls, were unsealed on Thursday night following a months-long court battle over the documents.
Maxwell’s lawyers filed multiple challenges — most recently on Thursday — in a bid to block the release of the documents, which they described as “extremely personal, confidential and subject to considerable abuse by the media.”
A crucial week on Capitol Hill that began with a rocky Republican rollout of a coronavirus relief package ended with a complete breakdown in negotiations, threatening to deepen the perils of an already embattled President Donald Trump.
The Republican-led Senate adjourned Thursday for a long weekend with no action on COVID-19 relief, all but ensuring that a $600 weekly federal unemployment benefit would expire Friday.
The payment has been a financial lifeline for more than 20 million out-of-work Americans. The U.S. recorded its worst quarterly economic contraction ever Thursday — during a week when the national death toll from the virus topped 150,000.
As President Trump ramps up his unfounded attacks on mail balloting as being susceptible to widespread fraud, postal employees and union officials say the changes implemented by Trump fundraiser-turned-postmaster general Louis DeJoy are contributing to a growing perception that mail delays are the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting.
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.
Former President Barack Obama will deliver the eulogy at Rep. John Lewis’s funeral on Thursday, according to CNN and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are also expected to attend the service honoring the late Georgia congressman and civil rights icon, the news outlets said, citing sources familiar with the plans.
Lewis, a Democrat, died earlier this month at the age of 80 after a months-long battle with pancreatic cancer.
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.
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.
As the U.S. neared 150,000 deaths from the novel coronavirus, President Donald Trump doubled down on his defense of an unproven drug to treat COVID-19 and offered a rosy picture of the growing public health crisis and of what is to come.
“We’re seeing improvements across the major metro areas and most hot spots. You can look at large portions of our country, it’s — it’s corona-free,” Trump said Tuesday afternoon. “But we are watching very carefully California, Arizona, Texas and most of Florida is starting to head down in the right direction — and I think you’ll see it rapidly head down very soon.”
Joe Biden said Tuesday he’ll be making a long-anticipated announcement next week: The naming of a running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket he will head.
After detailing in Wilmington, Delaware, his plan to combat racial inequality, the presumptive nominee told reporters he is “going to have a choice the first week in August, and I promise I’ll let you know when I do.”
Attorney General William Barr made a defiant appearance before a House committee on Tuesday, rejecting claims that he’d improperly interfered in the prosecutorial decision-making process to benefit President Donald Trump’s allies and defending the deployment of federal agents to cities against the wishes of local leaders.
Barr, appearing before the House Judiciary Committee for the first time since he was sworn in last February, has faced withering criticism from Democrats since his early days in office, when he mischaracterized the findings of Robert Mueller’s special counsel report ahead of its release. More recently, Barr has come under fire for his handling of cases against Trump associates Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, his involvement in the firing of a top federal prosecutor overseeing cases against other Trump associates, and his oversight of the federal law enforcement response to protests in Washington, D.C., and in cities across the nation following the police killing of George Floyd in May.
Ever since the beginning of the Trump crisis, I’ve written about Donald Trump’s obvious fetish for authoritarian dictatorships and how observing our nation’s most despotic president is an ongoing exercise in waiting for the other tyrannical shoe to drop.
Following the jackbooted nincompoopery of the Trump White House, as I’ve said multiple times before, is a lot like leaning too far back in our chairs and almost falling over backward — but catching ourselves at the last minute. Every day brings with it new devilry violently propelled from Trump’s twisted tennis-ball machine of awfulness, keeping the entire nation perpetually off balance.
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.
Robert O’Brien, President Donald Trump‘s national security adviser, has tested positive for COVID-19, making him the highest profile Trump official to contract the novel virus, the White House confirmed.
“National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien tested positive for COVID-19. He has mild symptoms and has been self-isolating and working from a secure location off site. There is no risk of exposure to the President or the Vice President. The work of the National Security Council continues uninterrupted,” the White House said in a statement Monday morning.
Former Vice President Joe Biden urged the Trump administration to take steps to ensure the development of a vaccine for the coronavirus will be “free from political pressure” and asked the White House to respect science as the nation reels from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The presumptive Democratic nominee for president made the comments in a blog post Monday amid news that several potential coronavirus vaccines were entering large-scale trials.
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.
