Rebecca Ballhaus
@rebeccaballhaus
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@WSJ investigative reporter. Previously covered the White House and money in politics. rebecca.ballhaus @wsj .com
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"We don't have a family pastor," Jacob Blake's father says on CNN. "I don't know who he talked to."
Trump said at tonight's briefing he had spoken with the Blake family's pastor.
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Trump just now: “I don’t make deals with Saudi Arabia. I don’t have money from Saudi Arabia. I have nothing to do with Saudi Arabia.”
Trump in August 2015: “Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million.”
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The crowd at tonight’s Trump rally in West Virginia is chanting, “Drain that swamp” and “Lock her up," on a day where the president’s former lawyer pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations and his former campaign chairman was convicted on eight counts of fraud charges.
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Former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor recalled on MSNBC that Trump “wanted to see if we could sell Puerto Rico, ‘could we swap Puerto Rico for Greenland,’ because, in his words, ‘Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor,’” confirming the NYT report from 2019.
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Trump on the number of coronavirus cases, per pool: “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
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NEW: The White House wanted the USS John McCain “out of sight” for Trump’s visit to Japan. A tarp was hung over the ship’s name ahead of the trip, and sailors—who wear caps bearing the ship’s name—were given the day off for Trump’s visit. w/
@glubold
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Franken: "There is some irony that I am leaving while a man who bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office, and a man who preyed on young girls runs for Senate with the full support of his party."
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Trump arrived 30 minutes late to today’s NATO summit, missed his scheduled meetings with at least two world leaders, prompted the secretary general to call an emergency session, held an impromptu 35-minute news conference, and is now leaving for the airport go fly to London.
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Bolton, asked if he has listened to the tape of Khashoggi’s murder: "No, I haven't listened to it. Why do you think I should? What do you think I'll learn from it?"
Reporter: "You're the national security adviser."
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The auditorium applauds when Duke professor Peter Feaver asks Bolton why he was willing to comply with Senate subpoena but not House subpoena.
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Trump won’t post WH visitor logs, citing “security risks,” & says move will save taxpayers $70K by 2020.
One Mar-a-Lago trip costs $2M+.
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Trump is racing to raise money for an “official election defense fund.” But the fine print on the solicitations tells a different story: Half -- or more -- of any contribution will be used to retire debt from his re-election campaign.
@bykowicz
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Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman had lunch with Rudy Giuliani at the Trump hotel in Washington YESTERDAY, a source who saw them tells
@nataliewsj
. They were arrested later that night at Dulles, where they were awaiting an international flight.
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NEWS: GOP Sen. Ron Johnson tells WSJ that the U.S. ambassador to the EU told him in August that the status of aid to Ukraine was tied to Trump’s interest in having Kiev investigate certain matters. Johnson confronted Trump, who denied it. w/
@siobhanehughes
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John Kelly says he warned Trump before he left: “Whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth — don’t do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.”
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Kavanaugh has hired the daughter of Amy Chua, who defended his treatment of women during his confirmation, as a clerk on the Supreme Court. During the confirmation, Chua and her daughter both forcefully pushed back on notion that she was seeking that job.
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News: Major Wall Street banks including Deutsche Bank and Bank of America have given congressional committees investigating Trump thousands of pages of documents related to Russians who may have had dealings with Trump, his family or his business.
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Trump in Mississippi: “Three border patrol people yesterday were very badly hurt, getting hit with rocks and stones.”
CBP commissioner earlier today: “Four agents were hit with rocks, but were wearing protective gear and did not suffer serious injuries.”
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A software fix to the Boeing 737 MAX was delayed for months as discussions between regulators and Boeing dragged on—and U.S. officials said the government shutdown halted work on the fix for five weeks.
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Michael Cohen testified Trump told him to threaten his high school, colleges, & the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores. Fordham confirmed a Trump aide called during the 2016 campaign for assurance that it wouldn’t release any Trump records.
Donald Trump paid someone to take the SAT on his behalf, his niece Mary Trump writes.
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Investigators have emails from late 2015 and early January 2016 in which Cohen communicated with or copied Don Jr. and Ivanka and discussed the Trump Tower Moscow project. Ivanka at one point recommended an architect.
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White House attorneys are examining whether two loans totaling more than $500 million to Jared Kushner’s family business may have violated any criminal laws or federal ethics regulations, according to a letter from OGE.
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NEWS: Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Giuliani associates who donated to a pro-Trump super PAC, were arrested late Wednesday on criminal charges of violating campaign finance rules. They have been under investigation by SDNY. w/
@aviswanatha
@sgurman
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An administration official texts, unsolicited: “This has become a farce. The legal effort is now making the president a national laughingstock.”
NEW statement from Rudy Giuliani & Jenna Ellis: “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”
Powell, Giuliani & Ellis all spoke at this week’s presser at the RNC.
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The D.C. attorney general has subpoenaed Trump’s inaugural committee for documents related to any payments to the Trump Organization and related to Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric Trump.
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DOJ prosecutors seeking a surveillance warrant against Carter Page alerted the FISA court that some of the information in their application came from a politically motivated source—contrary to what the GOP memo released today claims.
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Trump goes after the Oscars. “And the winner is a movie from South Korea. What the hell was that all about? We’ve got enough problems with South Korea, with trade. And after all that they give them best movie of the year?” Says ‘Gone with the Wind’ (1939) should’ve won instead.
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This is the first time a Supreme Court nominee has been confirmed without a single vote from a major minority party since December 1869.
The Senate has confirmed Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court justice. Republicans overwhelmingly backed Trump’s nominee eight days before Election Day in the face of Democratic objections.
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NEW: Trump was involved in or briefed on every step of the hush payments arranged by Michael Cohen, telling him of the Stormy Daniels payment in Oct. 2016, “Get it done,” according to Cohen’s testimony to prosecutors. What Trump knew and when he knew it:
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NEWS: Alex Jones played a greater role than previously known in organizing the Jan 6 rally where Trump told supporters to go to the Capitol, helping bring in a top Trump donor—a Publix heiress who gave $300K—who worked w/a Trump fundraiser on the event.
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Trump pilloried Clinton for such donations to the Clinton Foundation on the campaign trail
Saudi Arabia and UAE pledge $100 million to Ivanka's Women Entrepreneurs Fund, per
@carolelee
:
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The National Association of Manufacturers calls on Pence to "seriously consider" working with the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment "to preserve democracy."
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Fiona Hill, asked if she believes Sondland that he didn’t know a Burisma investigation meant a probe of the Bidens, says: "It is not credible to me that he was oblivious."
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NEWS: Betsy DeVos has resigned, writing in a letter to the president: "There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me."
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.
@WSJ
found $1B in undisclosed loans to firms Kushner partly owns. Not in revised file either
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In an Oval Office meeting just now, Trump asked the Baylor Lady Bears’ head coach Kim Mulkey, "Would you like to work at the White House, by any chance?"
Her response, per pool: "No."
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Trump on Michael Cohen: “He represents me with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal, he represented me.”
Trump has previously said he was unaware of Cohen’s efforts in Oct. 2016 to pay Stormy Daniels to remain silent about their alleged sexual encounter.
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Trump CONFIRMS
@wsj
report that he discussed Biden w/the Ukrainian president in their July call. Says their conversation was largely congratulatory” and “largely the fact that we don't want our people like VP Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”
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Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer and a longtime confidant of Trump, gave sworn testimony to the state investigators over two days last month. He is expected to meet again with the office.
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Jason Statham negotiated a deal limiting how badly he can be beaten up. Vin Diesel has his sister police the # of punches he gets. Dwayne Johnson enlists producers to balance his wins & losses.
@erichschwartzel
on action stars’ fear of looking like wimps:
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NEWS: Within a day of the release of the Mueller report, Trump sought to have Don McGahn publicly declare he didn’t consider Trump’s directive that he seek Mueller’s dismissal to be obstruction of justice. McGahn declined.
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Jay Sekulow just argued that "not a single witness” said they heard from the president himself that the security assistance was linked to investigations. Doubling down on that argument despite the prospect of having a witness who could testify to exactly that.
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The White House announces that all Senate Republicans except Mitt Romney—who voted to impeach Trump on one of two counts in February—have ben invited to join a bipartisan task force on reopening the economy.
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New: Gordon Sondland told House committees last week that efforts by Trump and his allies to press Kyiv to open investigations in exchange for a White House meeting with Ukraine’s president amounted to a quid pro quo, his lawyer said.
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NEW: As the virus spread among the people closest to him, Trump asked one adviser not to disclose results of their own positive test. “Don’t tell anyone,” Trump said.
More on the secrecy over positive tests in the West Wing, w/
@michaelcbender
:
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In congressional testimony, Kushner said no one on the campaign ever had contact w/WikiLeaks or Assange. In fact, Don Jr. forwarded his DMs w/WikiLeaks to Kushner + other top campaign aides.
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New: Emails reviewed by
@WSJ
show that in the lead-up to the Trump-Zelensky call, Sondland kept officials including Mulvaney apprised of the push for investigations. Mulvaney replied that he would schedule the call—which he then didn’t listen in on.
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New: Trump called one of his longtime legal advisers, Jay Goldberg, on Friday to discuss the Cohen probe. Goldberg warned him not to trust Cohen, saying on a scale of 100 to 1—where 100 is fully protecting the president—Cohen "isn't even a 1." via
@WSJ
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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin dismissed every member of the Pentagon’s advisory boards, ousting last-minute Trump administration nominees as well as officials appointed by previous administrations.
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Trump says he banned travel from Europe before March. He announced that ban March 11.
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NEW Bolton book excerpt in WSJ: In June 2019, Xi "explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. ... Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do."
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Tillerson in Texas: “So often, the president would say here's what I want to do and here's how I want to do it and I would have to say to him, Mr. President I understand what you want to do but you can't do it that way. It violates the law.”
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New details of Trump’s involvement in the 2016 payoff scheme: On June 27, 2016, after Trump learned that Karen McDougal was shopping around her story of an alleged affair with him, he called David Pecker and asked: Can you make this go away?
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Trump says he never threatened a coup and that “if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley,” in not the most persuasive rebuttal of a report that Milley feared Trump would attempt a coup.
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Alan Dershowitz, a staunch Trump ally, calls for the Senate Judiciary Committee to "slow down and postpone its vote” on Kavanaugh "until the FBI can investigate accusations of sexual misconduct leveled against him by three women."
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NEW: Fiona Hill told House committees today that she and other White House officials grew so alarmed about efforts to push Ukraine to open certain investigations that they raised their concerns with NSC lawyer John Eisenberg. w/
@aviswanatha
@nataliewsj
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Trump has told people he wants his signature to appear on the direct payment checks that will go out to many Americans. Normally, a civil servant—the disbursing officer for the payment center—would sign federal checks.
@AndrewRestuccia
scoop:
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NEWS: Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating whether Trump's 2017 inaugural committee misspent some of the record $107 million it raised, and whether some of its top donors gave money in exchange for access. w/
@rebeccadobrien
@aviswanatha
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Alvin Cole, a black teenager who was shot five times while fleeing police earlier this year, was the third person to be killed by the same police officer in five years in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.
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Trump pauses his remarks on vaccine development to note that the loud honking in the background is from truckers who are protesting in favor of him, calling it a “sign of love.”
The truckers are protesting low shipping rates during the pandemic and are seeking gov’t support.
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New: It took just hours for pro-Trump rioters to storm and occupy the U.S. Capitol. But the groundwork was laid for weeks by the president and a circle of key allies who fanned the flames. W/
@joe_palazzolo
@andrewrestuccia
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Unmasking U.S. identities in intel reports is a fairly routine process that occurs thousands of times a year and is requested by senior administration officials to better understand the context of intercepted conversations that are being reviewed.
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Donald Trump paid someone to take the SAT on his behalf, his niece Mary Trump writes.
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Andriy Yermak, a top aide to the Ukrainian president, in July asked the State Dept for Giuliani’s number. Then he called Giuliani to ask him to tone down his TV criticism of Zelensky. Giuliani responded by suggesting Ukraine investigate Hunter Biden.
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Foxconn got a $4B tax incentive package to build a huge factory in Wisconsin, a plan urged by Trump. Contractors bulldozed 75 homes and cleared hundreds of acres. Then Foxconn retreated. By Dec. 31, the company spent 1% of its pledged investment.
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NEW: Trump returned to the White House last night in a "rotten" mood—not only because of the convictions of his former lawyer and campaign chairman, but because he felt the audience at his West Virginia rally had been flat. w/
@peterwsj
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NEW: Trump ordered the removal of the ambassador to Ukraine after months of complaints from allies, including Rudy Giuliani, that she was undermining him abroad and obstructing efforts to persuade Kyiv to investigate Biden. w/
@MichaelCBender
@vmsalama
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Remarkable
@WSJ
investigation finds that the Proud Boys, who have tried to play down their involvement in the Capitol riot, in fact led some of the most pivotal moments of escalation.
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NEWS: Subpoenas indicate a broad federal investigation into possible money laundering, obstruction of justice & campaign finance violations. Among the entities the subpoenas seek records on: Giuliani Partners. w/
@rebeccadobrien
@shelbyholliday
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Rarely has a president's hometown been so delighted by his defeat.
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John Kelly, in interview with
@Scaramucci
, says he agrees w/Mattis. "The idea that you would unleash American active duty folks unless it’s an extremist situation…These are civilian responsibilities. We should be very, very careful before we contemplate sending in active duty.”
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NEWS: Top Trump donor Franklin Haney agreed to pay Michael Cohen $10 MILLION earlier this year if Cohen successfully helped obtain funding for a nuclear-power project, including a $5 billion loan from the Department of Energy. w/
@mrothfeld
@joe_palazzolo
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NEW: When Trump threatened to veto the spending bill this morning, aides warned him that he might catch blame for shutting down the government on a weekend he planned to spend at Mar-a-Lago.
“F— that,” the president replied.
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WSJ scoop: New York prosecutors are investigating financial dealings around some of Trump’s signature Manhattan properties, extending the known range of the criminal probe of the former president and his company.
@coryramey
@EmilyGlazer
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“I talked to Zelensky just now. He is prepared to receive Potus’ call. Will assure him that he intends to run a fully transparent investigation and will ‘turn over every stone,’” Sondland wrote on July 19.
Mulvaney responded: "I asked NSC to set it up for tomorrow."
New: Emails reviewed by
@WSJ
show that in the lead-up to the Trump-Zelensky call, Sondland kept officials including Mulvaney apprised of the push for investigations. Mulvaney replied that he would schedule the call—which he then didn’t listen in on.
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Yale Law School—where Kavanaugh said yesterday he got admitted by "busting my tail in college"—calls for an "additional investigation" into the allegations, saying proceeding without doing so is "not in the best interest of the Court or our profession."
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New: A network of at least 30 FB pages purporting to represent groups of Trump supporters from different states all appear to be set up by Robert Hyde, the latest impeachment figure. This week, they’ve shared dozens of posts defending Hyde.
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A White House official clarifies Dr. Conley’s timeline. He says Conley meant to say it’s Day 3, not 72 hours in—the diagnosis was made Thursday night—and that Garibaldi meant to say it’s been two days, not 48 hours, since the Regeneron was administered on Thursday night.
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“All I have to say is that in my 10 short months in Congress — it’s not even noon, right — and this is my most disturbing day in Congress so far. Very troubling.” —Rep. Andy Levin, as he left Bill Taylor’s deposition this morning.
@jesselnaranjo
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Trump introduces Marillyn Hewson, CEO of Lockheed Martin, as Marillyn Lockheed. Tells her of the F-35: “It’s stealth. You cannot see it. Is that correct? It better be correct.”
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Trump told Comey the dossier couldn't be right because he never even spent the night in Russia on his 2013 trip there. But Bloomberg has flight records showing he landed in Moscow at 6:15 a.m. on the Friday and didn't leave until 3:58 a.m. Sunday morning.
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If SDNY uncovered evidence of criminal conduct by Trump in office, Cummings wrote, "this would be the second time the president has not been held accountable for his actions due to his position. The Office of the President should not be used as a shield for criminal conduct.”
News: The House Oversight Committee sent a letter to SDNY asking if the DOJ policy against indicting sitting presidents played a role in the decision not to charge Trump for campaign-finance violations. Cummings also requested prosecutors’ evidence.
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Grassley suggests his panel has trouble attracting women because "It's a lot of work—maybe they don't want to do it."
He later clarified: "We have a hard time getting men on the committee." (The 11 Republicans on the panel are all men.)
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Trump on Rudy Giuliani: “He looks for corruption wherever he goes."
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Michael Cohen repeatedly pitched Uber, which said no, citing his ownership of NYC taxi medallions as a potential conflict of interest. He modified his pitch in response and reminded the company he was "the president's lawyer."
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The FBI employees who called Trump an "idiot" in their texts called Bernie Sanders an "idiot," too. Also had harsh words for Holder, Chelsea Clinton, Paul Ryan + Edward Snowden.
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ABC has a recording that appears to capture Trump telling associates he wanted Yovanovitch fired at a dinner with Parnas and Fruman in the spring of 2018—backing up Parnas’s allegations in an interview last week.
“Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow."
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NEWS: A grand jury has issued a subpoena related to the SDNY investigation into Rudy Giuliani’s business dealings in Ukraine, seeking documents from former Rep. Pete Sessions about his dealings with Giuliani, Parnas, Fruman and others.
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NEWS: The Justice Department is preparing to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and is increasingly optimistic it will be able to get him into a U.S. courtroom, per
@aviswanatha
@duberyan
.
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New: A decade ago, Julie Swetnick made a sexual harassment complaint against her former employer, New York Life Insurance. Representing her was the firm run by Debra Katz, who now reps Christine Blasey Ford. She was ultimately paid a financial settlement.
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Mueller news this week—
Tuesday: Prosecutors file sentencing memo on Flynn that details his cooperation & could shed more light on campaign activity.
By Friday: Prosecutors detail why Mueller scrapped Manafort’s plea agreement & lay out the lies he allegedly told.
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Omarosa Manigault Newman tells
@peterwsj
she has joined the
#resistance
and plans to spend the midterm campaign season laying out her case against supporting Trump.
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The Trump campaign paid $93,000 in the first two months of 2018 to the law firm of Charles Harder, the lawyer representing Trump in the Stormy Daniels case, per new FEC filing.
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Tom Cotton, a military veteran, on CBS defends Trump calling head injuries suffered by American service members in the Iranian missile strike “headaches.”
"He’s not dismissing their injuries. He’s describing their injuries."
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The publisher of the National Enquirer agreed to pay $187,500 as part of a settlement with the Federal Election Commission over a 2016 scheme to buy and suppress the story of a woman who alleged an affair with Trump.
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Trump just answered a question about why the U.S. lags other countries, like South Korea, in per-capita testing by saying that Seoul has 38M people “all tightly wound together.”
Seoul’s population is just under 10M people. The U.S.’s largest city, New York, has just under 9M.
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