Trump Administration

ABC News reports: More than 100 Democratic lawmakers on Thursday signed on to a letter calling for President Trump to fire senior adviser Stephen Miller as a civil rights group details hundreds of controversial emails he sent prior to his time in the administration. “Given Mr. Miller’s role in shaping immigration policy for your administration, his documented dedication to extremist, …

The House is obviously running behind schedule. PBS NewsHour reports: Laura Cooper is the Defense Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia and thus the top Pentagon official working on Ukraine. In closed-door testimony last month, she told investigators that the White House had directed the freeze on aid to Ukraine and that Kyiv was concerned by the …

Fox News reports: During day four of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, European Union ambassador Gordon Sondland “took out the bus” and “ran over” President Trump and other top officials, host of “Fox News Sunday” Chris Wallace said Wednesday. Appearing on “America’s Newsroom” with host Bill Hemmer and Sandra Smith, Wallace said he thinks what Gordon Sondland was “trying to do” …

Yahoo News reports: U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday he did not watch a testimony from European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland in the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump and that he was proud of American policy in Ukraine. “I didn’t see a single thing … I was working, I was in meetings all day,” Pompeo told …

The Washington Post reports: A federal judge said she intends to rule no later than the end of the day Monday on whether former White House counsel Donald McGahn must testify under subpoena to Congress, after the House Judiciary Committee asked her to accelerate a decision because it aims to call him after the current round of public impeachment hearings …

The Daily Beast reports: The Trump White House has taken the extraordinary step of distributing talking points to allies of the president trashing one of its employees. The talking points, which were shared with The Daily Beast, focus on Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified publicly on Tuesday that he had registered complaints about President Donald Trump’s call with the …

NBC News reports: White House senior adviser Stephen Miller had more editorial influence over the right-wing news website Breitbart during the 2016 presidential campaign than previously known and attempted to push articles attacking then-presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., according to a new batch of leaked emails shared with NBC News. The emails, which were first given to the Southern …

NBC News reports: White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham claimed on Tuesday that departing former aides to President Barack Obama left notes saying “you will fail” and “you aren’t going to make it” for the incoming staff of Donald Trump. Former Obama aides quickly denied Grisham’s claim, reacting to a tweet from a CNN reporter that Grisham had said during …

The Jerusalem Post reports: The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem late on Monday warned Americans about traveling in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, soon after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the United States was softening its position on Israel’s Jewish settlements. “The U.S. Embassy advises U.S. citizens in or considering travel to or through Jerusalem, the West Bank, or …

Axios reports: As televised impeachment hearings roll into Week 2, one surprise has been how many of the Trump team’s wounds have been self-inflicted, because of his allies’ curious habit of leaking on themselves. Rudy Giuliani, at the center of the Ukraine interference, butt-dialed an NBC reporter, and was “heard discussing need for cash and trashing Bidens.” Reporters took to …

The New York Times reports: The White House sought on Monday night to quell a torrent of speculation about President Trump’s health two days after a mysterious, unannounced visit to the hospital, denying that he was treated for an emergency and insisting that it was just “regular, primary preventive care.” “Despite some of the speculation, the president has not had …

PBS NewsHour reports: Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Monday told the PBS NewsHour that asking for personal favors and using United States assets as collateral is “wrong.” Tillerson spoke with NewsHour anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff at a luncheon hosted by the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in San Antonio. Tillerson discussed reports that President …

The Washington Post reports: Federal prosecutors in New York are preparing to file criminal charges as early as this week against two Bureau of Prisons workers who were supposed to check regularly on millionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein the night he hanged himself in his cell, according to people familiar with the matter. The two corrections workers, whose names have …

Politico reports: Mina Chang, a high-ranking State Department staffer who vaulted into the public spotlight after NBC reported she had inflated her resume, has resigned from her position. NBC reported last week that Chang had misleadingly claimed in her official bio that she was an “alumna” of Harvard Business School when in fact she only attended a seven-week course there. …

The Associated Press reports: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is expected to announce on Monday that the U.S. is softening its position on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, the latest in a series of Trump administration moves that weaken Palestinian claims to statehood. Pompeo plans to repudiate a 1978 State Department legal opinion that held that civilian settlements …

CBS News reports: A CBS News investigation has uncovered a possible pay-for-play scheme involving the Republican National Committee and President Donald Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the Bahamas. Emails obtained by CBS News show the nominee, San Diego billionaire Doug Manchester, was asked by the RNC to donate half a million dollars as his confirmation in the Senate hung in …

Axios reports: Former White House national security adviser John Bolton met privately with President Trump in August in an effort to convince him to release nearly $400 million in frozen military aid to Ukraine, former National Security Council official Tim Morrison told impeachment investigators last month. The episode underscores how important Bolton’s testimony could ultimately be to determining why Trump …

The Houston Chronicle reports: A prominent Texas Democrat is joining calls from Congress for the resignation of a White House adviser credited with shaping President Donald Trump’s immigration policies after the Southern Poverty Law Center published emails showing the adviser promoting white nationalist viewpoints. U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat who leads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, on Thursday …

The New York Times reports: Attorney General William P. Barr on Friday vigorously defended President Trump’s use of executive authority and suggested that House Democrats were subverting the will of voters by exploring whether to remove the president from office for abusing his power. Mr. Trump campaigned on a vow to upend Washington, and voters were aware of his agenda …

Politico reports: Amazon is going to court to overturn the Pentagon’s decision to award Microsoft a cloud computing contract worth up to $10 billion, claiming the selection process for the so-called JEDI program was injected with “unmistakable bias” and “political influence.” The Pentagon last month named Microsoft the winner in the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program after President Donald Trump …