First Run News

BLOOMER, Wis. — Marc Boettcher’s day started before dawn, when he fired up the hammer mill that ground up corn for a mixture he fed to the steers in his barn. There was an empty room where he used to milk dairy cows until he sold them a couple of years back, but on a cold morning this summer, much of the barn was full of cattle — curious, anxious, and endearingly weird — who jostled one another to get a look at him. One left him a gift of manure in the drinking trough.

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Bloomberg will not accept political donations if he runs for president and he will not take a salary if he wins, according to senior aides who offered new details on Saturday about the New York billionaire’s plans to navigate his wealth as he marches toward a formal 2020 announcement. “He has never taken a political contribution in his life. He is not about to start,” Bloomberg chief adviser Howard Wolfson said in an interview.

IRBIL, Iraq (AP) — Vice President Mike Pence worked to reassure the United States’ Kurdish allies in an unannounced trip to Iraq on Saturday, the highest-level American trip since President Donald Trump ordered a pullback of U.S. forces in Syria two months ago. Flying in a C-17 military cargo aircraft, Pence landed in Irbil, capital of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region, to meet with Iraqi Kurdistan President Nechirvan Barzani. The visit was meant to hearten the United States’ regional partners in the fight against the Islamic State group after the U.S.

WASHINGTON — After a disastrous week of impeachment hearings, with a somber parade of witnesses implicating him on national television, President Trump assumed a familiar posture: total denial. “There’s nothing there,” he insisted during a call into the friendly territory of the “Fox & Friends” morning TV show Friday. “I don’t even know these people!” When one of the Fox News hosts delicately brought up the testimony of his own handpicked ambassador saying there was a “quid pro quo” with Ukraine, Trump denied it again.

Former New York City Mayor MORE purchased a multi-million ad blitz in several states as he prepares to enter the crowded 2020 Democratic primary field. The ad buy hit $31.5 million as of 5:05 p.m. ET and will be featured in 98 local markets as well as some national cable channels, ad tracking firm Advertising Analytics confirmed to The Hill. The purchase is the largest of any candidate ever in a single week of political advertising. The 60-second ads will start airing Monday and run through Dec.

"They gave the server to CrowdStrike or whatever it’s called, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian, and I still want to see that server," Trump told the hosts of "Fox & Friends." "A lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine," he said. "Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?" "Are you sure they did that?" co-host Steve Doocey asked. "That’s what the word is," Trump responded. "That’s what I asked actually on my phone call, you know. I asked it very point-blank because we’re looking for corruption. There’s tremendous corruption.

MORE on Friday signaled he is walking back a long-delayed proposal to remove all flavored e-cigarettes from the market, amid concerns over job losses and the dangers of counterfeit products. Vaping and tobacco industry representatives and conservative groups clashed with patient advocates during a heated White House meeting, as Trump said he is worried about the effects of a complete flavor ban. “If you don't give it to them, it is going to come here illegally,” Trump said, adding “they could be selling something on a street corner that

A Justice Department watchdog is expected to strongly criticize FBI officials for being careless in their pursuit of obtaining wiretaps on a former Trump campaign aide during the start of the Russia probe, but not find they were acting with a bias toward reported Friday afternoon. But the highly anticipated report from the Department of Justice inspector general (IG) is also expected to say top agency leaders did not act with a bias toward against President Trump in terms of how they undertook the probe. In particular, the DOJ IG, Michael Horowitz, faulted Kevin Clinesmith, a lower-level

After a two-week barrage of public hearings, Democrats are eyeing the next stage of their impeachment inquiry as they edge closer to an end-of-year goal for wrapping up their investigation into MORE’s dealings with Ukraine. House Intelligence Committee Chairman MORE (D-Calif.) and other Democrats on the panel finished their last scheduled public hearings this week with what sounded like closing arguments for impeachment.  Schiff said lawmakers will determine their next steps “in the coming days.” The committees leading the fact-finding phase

Gibboney — whose 29-year-old son Ronald Da Silva was killed by an illegal alien in 2002 in El Monte, California  — is pleading with California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to make sure that her son’s killer is turned over to ICE for deportation rather than being freed into the U.S. The illegal alien killer had been previously deported from the U.S.