Democrat Adam Schiff’s committee formally presented its findings to the House Judiciary Committee on Monday, bringing the House one step closer to a formal vote to impeach President Trump.

POSTED DECEMBER 09, 2019 10:52 AM

Depends if it actually happened.

POSTED DECEMBER 09, 2019 7:05 AM

This city's deepest wound - the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that killed three and injured hundreds more - will be re-examined Thursday when lawyers for bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev seek to have his death sentence lifted because the jury pool was too traumatized to render a fair verdict. The then-19-year old Tsarnaev and his 26-year-old brother Tamerlan sparked five days of panic in Boston that began April 15, 2013, when they detonated a pair of homemade pressure cooker bombs at the race's packed finish line. The pair eluded capture for days, punctuated by a gunbattle with police in Watertown that killed Tamerlan and led to a daylong lockdown of Boston and most of its suburbs while heavily armed officers and troops conducted a house-to-house search for Dzhokhar.

POSTED DECEMBER 09, 2019 6:21 AM

Pete Buttigieg implied that he would take money off billionaires and closed-door fundraisers during a terse exchange with a student activist, amid growing criticism of the Democratic candidate’s fundraising strategy.The 2020 presidential candidate has come under scrutiny for his decision to take money from wealthy donors after a number of Democrats have pledged to take “big money” out of politics.

POSTED DECEMBER 09, 2019 6:18 AM

As our planet and its oceans warm, the polar ice sheets are melting at accelerated rates. Greenland's average yearly ice loss is 262 billion tons.

POSTED DECEMBER 10, 2019 12:09 PM

POSTED DECEMBER 10, 2019 2:00 PM

(Bloomberg) -- Former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates deserves leniency for his “extraordinary assistance” with offshoots of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, the government told a judge just days before his sentencing.Prosecutors said in a court filing Tuesday that they don’t oppose Gates’s request for probation. They also said that Gates deserved praise for standing up to powerful people and weathering “intense media scrutiny.” They wrote, without providing specifics, that “Gates received pressure not to cooperate with the U.S. government, including assurances of monetary assistance.”Gates was a critical witness in Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference. He was the star prosecution witness in the trial of his former boss Paul Manafort, who was convicted of bank and tax fraud, and he testified against Trump ally Roger Stone and former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig. Gates met with investigators more than 50 times, prosecutors said.But prosecutors also noted Gates’s many crimes.“Gates did not commit crimes only with Manafort,” they wrote. “On a far smaller scale, he also committed crimes on his own and for his own benefit. He failed to report more than $3 million in income on his tax returns over several years, failed to disclose his own foreign bank accounts, and stole approximately several hundred thousand dollars from Manafort’s overseas accounts.”Gates also engaged in mortgage fraud by overstating his income, submitted false reimbursement vouchers to employers, and participated in an investment-fraud scheme with a man charged in Manhattan, they said.Gates was Manafort’s right-hand man in his political consulting firm and worked with him for a decade before joining him on President Donald Trump’s campaign. Manafort is serving a 7 1/2-year prison sentence for financial fraud.Indicted in 2017 with Manafort, who was Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Gates later pleaded guilty to conspiring with Manafort to hide their work as unregistered foreign agents and to conceal his former boss’s offshore bank accounts.Gates’s lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson to sentence him to probation in a late Monday court filing. He said he accepted responsibility “in every way possible.” He will be sentenced on Dec. 17.Read MoreGates Says He Stole, Lied and Cheated But Trust Him AnywayTrump Hovers Over Stone Trial in Testimony on Clinton LeaksEx-Trump Campaign Aide Gates Testifies in Trial of Gregory Craig(Updates with prosecutors’ praise of Gates in second paragraph)To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew Harris in federal court in Washington at aharris16@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, David S. JoachimFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

POSTED DECEMBER 10, 2019 4:21 PM

Timothy Ginter, who said he had ‘no knowledge’ of Project Blitz, was listed as co-chair of state branch of group behind the campaignAn Ohio legislator who said he had “no knowledge” of a rightwing Christian bill mill called Project Blitz is, in fact, the co-chair of the state branch of an organization behind the campaign.The Ohio state representative Timothy Ginter sponsored a bill called the Student Religious Liberties Act. Opponents argued the bill would provide students with a religious exemption to facts, and would frighten teachers and school administrators into including religion in school functions.The Guardian revealed the bill was nearly identical to one promoted by Project Blitz, a state legislative project guided by three Christian right organizations, including the Congressional Prayer Caucus (CPC), WallBuilders and the ProFamily Legislators Conference. Project Blitz aims to promote and help pass conservative legislation across the US to fulfil its rightwing Christian agenda.When initially approached, Ginter told the Guardian in an email from a legislative aide that he had “no knowledge of ‘Project Blitz’ and has not been working with WallBuilders or the Congressional Prayer Caucus”.However, a screenshot shows Ginter was listed as the co-chair of the Ohio Prayer Caucus, the state chapter of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, as recently as January 2019. Ginter’s former chief of staff, Chris Albanese, is currently listed as the state director of the state chapter of CPC, Ohio Prayer Caucus.“I would call it an outright lie,” said Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst with Political Research Associates, and an expert on the Christian right. “The Prayer Caucus in the states are the action arm of Project Blitz – it is Project Blitz,” he said. “When he told you, ‘I’ve never heard of Project Blitz,’ that was a lie,” said Clarkson.The Guardian repeatedly called and emailed both Ginter and the the Republican Ohio house speaker, Larry Householder. Neither responded to these phone or email requests.In a statement at the time, Ginter argued the bill was necessary because, “well-funded groups” were intimidating school officials with “the thread of litigation”. His bill, he argued, would clarify their responsibilities.Ginter also argued the Student Religious Liberties Bill was not a Christian bill, because it does not explicitly mention Christianity. However, the Ohio Prayer Caucus he co-chaired explicitly lays out that it support legislators “who are standing for faith, morality and Judeo-Christian principles”.The Congressional Prayer Caucus also circulated an Ohio Prayer Proclamation. Among its signers are Ginter; the former representative Bill Hayes, who originally sponsored the bill; and the former House speaker Cliff Rosenberger. Rosenberger resigned in 2018 after a search warrant and subpoena revealed the FBI was investigating Rosenberger for corruption involving three payday lending representatives, according to the Dayton Daily News.Prominent defenders of religious liberties, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Anti-Defamation League, oppose the legislation. Republicans in the Ohio House passed the legislation with a party-line vote in November. It has not yet been taken up by the Ohio senate.

POSTED DECEMBER 09, 2019 5:00 AM

Iran said American authorities are holding about 20 Iranian nationals in jail, its official news agency reported Tuesday, a day after Tehran said it was ready for more prisoner swaps with the U.S. A prisoner exchange over the weekend saw Iran free a Chinese-American scholar from Princeton who had been held for three years on widely criticized espionage charges. It was seen as a rare diplomatic breakthrough between Tehran and Washington after months of tensions.

POSTED DECEMBER 10, 2019 10:53 AM

The long awaited 434-page report finds that FBI’s team conducting Crossfire Hurricane— the code name for the bureau’s investigation into links between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin — improperly relied too heavily on allegations made by Christopher Steele, a former British spy who had been hired by an opposition research firm working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

POSTED DECEMBER 09, 2019 5:31 PM