Former special counsel Robert Mueller will make his much-hyped appearance on Capitol Hill Wednesday, but neither party expects to learn anything new from Mueller's 5-plus hours of public testimony, according to conversations with more than a dozen members of Congress and staffers involved in the hearing preparations.
The bottom line: Each party sees the hearings as a political opportunity — whether it be Democrats trying to stoke support for impeachment or Republicans seeking to sow distrust in the Justice Department's Russia investigation.
President Trump made small talk with the Irish prime minister as they sat in the Oval Office in mid-March, accompanied by a handful of senior American and Irish officials. Trump, who wore a green tie and filled his jacket pocket with a clump of shamrock to honor the Irish leader's annual St. Patrick's Day visit, turned with a half-smile to his hawkish national security adviser John Bolton, according to two sources who were in the room.
"John," Trump asked, "Is Ireland one of those countries you want to invade?"
Behind the scenes: The joke captured how Trump often privately interacts with Bolton, even occasionally in front of foreign heads of state. "John has never seen a war he doesn't like," Trump said in a recent Oval Office meeting, according to a source with direct knowledge.
Several of the leading Democratic presidential contenders told Axios that if elected, they would go further than the Trump administration in confronting China over its imprisonment of more than 1 million Uighur Muslims in its Xinjiang region.
Why it matters: It has been two years since the internment camps — which activists say are designed to erase the Uighur identity — first came to light internationally. The Trump administration has considered imposing sanctions on Chinese officials over the camps, but has yet to act amid threats of retaliation.
Elizabeth Warren understands Wall Street better than any other presidential candidate. She studied it in her previous career as a Harvard professor, and she has effectively built her own think tank inside the Senate, coming up with genuinely novel ideas for how to improve financial regulation.
What to watch: Warren has already received the grudging respect of many on Wall Street. Her diagnoses of where the financial services industry falls short are generally accurate, and her proposed regulations would probably give a competitive advantage to financial giants with large compliance departments.
House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said on ABC's "This Week" that there's "no doubt" that President Trump is a racist and that for the first time in his 37 years in public service, he has constituents telling him they're "scared of their leader."
Immigration judges have been issuing more bail bonds over the past several years — and more expensive ones, according to data by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
Why it matters: The higher the bail, the more likely immigrants will remain in crowded ICE detention centers for months before they're even considered for deportation.
The Trump administration plans to revise the U.S. citizenship test to ensure that "it continues to serve as an accurate measure of a naturalization applicant's civics knowledge," the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a statement.
Why it matters: It's the latest in a series ofchanges to U.S. immigration laws and policies President Trump has sought to implement, including a policy introduced this month requiring immigrants to apply for U.S. asylum from a 3rd country and a thwarted attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said at a New York City town hall Saturday that President Trump's "go back" tweets targeting her and 3 other Democratic congresswomen of color show his hardline immigration policies are really about racism.
Once you start telling American citizens to quote 'go back to your own countries,' this tells you that this president's policies are not about immigration, it's about ethnicity and racism."
Why it matters: Trump's associates told Axios' Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen that race-baiting is central to his 2020 strategy. Per Axios' Sara Fischer, much of Trump's Facebook spending is focused heavily on immigration messaging, as he targets older, white voters and Latino voters.
The big picture: During her town hall, broadcast on The National Desk's Facebook page, Ocasio-Cortez rejected Trump's claim that he tried to quiet a "send her back" chant directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) during a North Carolina campaign rally on Wednesday.
"Roll back the tape. ... He relished it. He took it in and he's doing this intentionally."
The U.S. removed Turkey from the F-35 fighter jet program on Wednesday, escalating a months-long standoff over Turkey's purchase of Russian S-400 air defense systems.
Why it matters: Turkey is a strategic U.S. ally in the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia and an important partner in American relations with the Muslim world. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to move forward with the S-400 purchase risks undermining NATO military coordination and exposing U.S. and broader NATO alliance capabilities to Russian intelligence.
The Democratic National Committee raised $8.5 million in June, of which it spent $7.5 million, according to a new FEC filing.
The big picture: The DNC ended the month with nearly $9.3 million cash on hand. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee hasn't disclosed its June numbers yet, but closed out May with $37 million cash on hand, writes Politico. The DNC spent the bulk of its funds last month on events, though the filing failed to specify whether the functions were directly related to the first round of primary debates.
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