The House Intelligence Committee on Thursday released the transcript of its closed-door interview with State Department official George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs.
Why it matters: Kent is scheduled to testify in open session next Wednesday as part of the House's first public impeachment hearings. He testified last month that he was instructed to "lay low" on Ukraine matters and that he was edged out on Ukraine policy by EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland, special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, per the New York Times.
Donald Trump Jr. defended publicly sharing the Ukraine whistleblower's alleged identity on ABC's "The View" Thursday, and he said Joe Biden "doesn't know what state he's in" when a host commented on how President Trump views Biden as a leading 2020 competitor.
Why it matters: The president has said the whistleblower's identity "must" be determined after details of the complaint have been examined in an impeachment inquiry. House impeachment committee members have accused Trump of withholding military aid to Ukraine to pressure its government to investigate the Bidens.
The Trump administration’s plan to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), set to be argued before the Supreme Court next week, could not only upend 700,000 immigrants’ lives but present serious risks to U.S. national security.
The big picture: DACA has offered young immigrants temporary protection from deportation and the legal ability to work. Ending the program would consume significant law enforcement resources while hampering U.S. military readiness and Western Hemispheric stability.
A judge has ordered President Trump and his children to pay $2 million to a group of nonprofit organizations as part of a settlement with the New York state attorney general's office involving "persistent" violations of charities law, reports CNN.
Why it matters: The lawsuit alleges that the Trumps violated state and federal campaign finance laws in 2016 by using the Donald J. Trump Foundation's tax-exempt status "as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump's business and political interests." The Trump Foundation agreed to dissolve last December in compliance with the lawsuit.
2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders is calling for the breakup of Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) in a new immigration plan out Thursday.
"Critics from across the political spectrum have documented the dysfunction and unaccountability of DHS, and President Trump has turned Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into a renegade detention and deportation force. Immigration is not a threat to national security. It is long past time we break up the Department of Homeland Security and refocus its mission on keeping our country safe and responding effectively to emergencies."
Protecting elections from hacking threats means a lot more than protecting election systems from being hacked. Malicious hackers can find plenty of other ways to interfere with elections — notably by discouraging voting through election-day attacks on municipal systems.
Driving the news: Security firm Cybereason has been exploring that kind of election tampering in a series of tabletop simulations over the last year. Tuesday, at the third exercise — essentially a Dungeons and Dragons-style game for law enforcement, government employees and security researchers — a "red team" pretended to attack a city, while a "blue team" defended it.
Former White House national security adviser John Bolton did not appear for his closed-door deposition on Thursday, instead telling the House committees conducting the impeachment inquiry that he would challenge a potential subpoena for his testimony in court.
Why it matters: A House Intelligence Committee official said that Democrats have "no interest in allowing the administration to play a rope-a-dope with us in the courts for months," and that the White House's decision to block Bolton from testifying will be used as further evidence of obstruction for a potential article of impeachment.
Why it matters: This decision "marks a rare instance of the government being held legally accountable for the mental trauma brought by its policies," writes the Times.
President Donald Trump has lost 41% of the Cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries and under secretaries he appointed in his first year in office, new data from the Partnership for Public Service‘s Center for Presidential Transition shows.
Why it matters: This far outpaces the turnover rate for recent predecessors at the same stage of their presidencies — and underscores the challenges Trump may face in recruiting and retaining a new stable of top officials if he wins re-election.
Elizabeth Warren, who rose to the top with big liberal bets, is banking a big slice of her presidential run on full-throated support for Medicare for All.
Why it matters: Warren is taking a beating on social media after claiming middle class Americans won’t pay higher taxes to fund health care coverage fully paid for by taxpayers, according to data from NewsWhip provided exclusively to Axios. At the same time, her poll numbers nationally are slipping.
Taking part in a storied tradition for the first-in-the-nation primary, Vice President Mike Pence is flying to New Hampshire today to formally file the Trump-Pence 2020 ticket for the ballot.
Why it matters: Flipping New Hampshire has been on President Trump's wish list since he lost there in 2016 by a margin of less than a half a percentage point. But the veep's trip is also part of a deliberately amped-up travel schedule as the White House tries to show it isn't buckling under the strain of impeachment.
President Trump urged voters at a rally in Monroe, Louisiana, Wednesday night to back businessman Eddie Rispone's bid to unseat the state's Gov. John Bel Edwards (D), whom he labeled a "radical, liberal," ahead of the Nov. 16 runoff.
Attorney General Bill Barr declined President Trump's request to declare via a news conference that the president "had broken no laws" during his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Washington Post and ABC News reported Wednesday. Trump denied the report in a late-night tweet.
The big picture: The president's reported request, made "sometime around Sept. 25," coincides with the day the administration's released its memorandum of the Trump-Ukraine call, which helped launch an impeachment inquiry into the president.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and ex-Trump campaign chairman Rick Gates — two prominent witnesses in the Russia investigation — are expected to testify at former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone's trial, prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky said Wednesday, per AP.
Why it matters: Zelinsky, who worked with former special counsel Robert Mueller in the Russia probe, said Stone tried to cover up his alleged attempts to determine if WikiLeaks had damaging information on Hillary Clinton, the New York Times reports.
