Axios

Acting commissioner for the Customs and Border Protection agency Mark Morgan broke federal rules in a previous position by soliciting sponsors to pay for FBI happy hours, the San Francisco Chronicle newly reports.

Where it stands: Morgan continued the practice even after being warned that asking outside entities to fund the functions was not in compliance with federal rules, according to the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg said Tuesday that he has spoken with the author of a recent article in The Root that disparaged him for saying in 2011 that kids in "lower income, minority neighborhoods" don't have evidence that education leads to success.

Driving the news: Buttigieg acknowledged his struggle with attracting black voters at the fifth Democratic debate last week, saying he welcomes "the challenge." Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been closing in on Joe Biden's lead with black Democrats.

House Democrats accused the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Tuesday of engaging in a "pattern of abuse" by unlawfully freezing nearly $400 million in Ukraine aid, an allegation now at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, Politico reports.

Driving the news: A report released by the House Budget and Appropriations committees outlines a timeline of the aid being withheld, with the first official OMB action to halt the aid coming on the evening of July 25 — hours after President Trump's now-infamous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at a press conference on Tuesday that the U.S. has a "duty" to investigate a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election by hacking the Democratic National Committee's network servers, the Washington Post reports.

Why it matters: Former Trump administration officials have described the theory as a "fictional narrative," developed and propagated by Russian security services themselves. The U.S. intelligence community has said Russia was responsible for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

President Trump tweeted Tuesday that the media is "reading far too much" into Monday's decision by a federal judge that would force former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify in the House impeachment inquiry.

Why it matters: Though the decision is being appealed, the judge rejected in harsh terms the argument that White House aides are "absolutely immune" from congressional subpoenas, blasting the theory as "exactly backwards" in terms of the principles of separation of powers.

Michael Bloomberg's entry into the 2020 presidential race was reflexively roasted in certain quarters as little more than a billionaire trying to buy an election — or, in the more succinct words of Anand Giridharadas, "plutes gonna plute."

Between the lines: What gets lost in between aren't the specifics of Bloomberg's record, or if he'd make a better or worse president than his rivals. It's the intrinsic value of entrepreneurship, and if that remains an aspirational touchstone for American voters.

A federal judge ruled Monday that former White House counsel Don McGahn must testify under subpoena in the ongoing House impeachment inquiry, rejecting the White House's assertion that its aides are "absolutely immune" from congressional subpoenas. McGahn and the Justice Department appealed the ruling on Tuesday.

"When DOJ insists that Presidents can lawfully prevent their senior-level aides from responding to compelled congressional process and that neither the federal courts nor Congress has the power to do anything about it, DOJ promotes a conception of separation-of-powers principles that gets these constitutional commands exactly backwards. In reality, it is a core tenet of this Nation’s founding that the powers of a monarch must be split between the branches of the government to prevent tyranny."

Efforts to crack down on nefarious content have forced pro-Trump communities online to migrate to newly-created sites and private groups, according to a new report from social intelligence firm Storyful provided to Axios.

Driving the news: Moderators of the r/The_Donald subreddit have urged users to move from Reddit, where their original subreddit page had been quarantined in June, to a newly created site called thedonald.win.

GOP Sen. John Kennedy told CNN Monday he was wrong in reiterating a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine may have interfered in the 2016 presidential election by hacking the Democratic National Committee's computer servers.