First Run News

The emails informed Ciaramella and a handful of other Obama administration foreign policy officials about Soros’s whereabouts, the contents of Soros’s private meetings about Ukraine and a future meeting the billionaire activist was holding with the prime minister of Ukraine. A primary recipient of the Open Society emails along with Ciaramella was then-Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who played a central role in the anti-Trump dossier affair.

ERIE, Pa. — Harold Klinzing, a 46-year-old roofer who loves his labor union, is the sort of voter Democratic presidential victories were once built upon. “I loved Bill Clinton,” Klinzing recalled fondly. “He was my favorite president. I loved him to death.” But after voting for Barack Obama in 2008, Klinzing, a lifelong Democrat, had soured on him by 2012 and sat out that election entirely.

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.

LEWISTON, Maine (AP) — Republican Sen. Susan Collins has a well-funded Democrat prepping to challenge her next year. She has national women’s groups ready to attack her over her vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanagh. And she’s a moderate facing an electorate that increasingly prioritizes purity. Still, the four-term Maine senator’s biggest hurdle to reelection may be the president of her own party. President Donald Trump’s potential impeachment in the House and subsequent trial in the Senate presents a distinct dilemma for Collins.

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg apologized for not moving faster to reduce police stops under a “stop-and-frisk” policy while he was in office that critics said targeted blacks and Hispanics. Bloomberg spoke as he considers a late bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential contest. “Over time, I’ve come to understand something that I long struggled to admit to myself: I got something important wrong. I got something important really wrong,” Bloomberg said in remarks to the congregation at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn on Sunday.

President Trump took to Twitter on Sunday to slam Jennifer Williams, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, who’s due to testify in the public impeachment inquiry into the president’s actions with Ukraine. Trump called Williams a “Never Trumper.” The longtime State Department employee, currently a special adviser to Pence, was on the July 25 phone call that’s at the center of the inquiry, and said in closed-door testimony on Nov.

The White House is standing by senior adviser MORE as he faces calls from dozens of Democrats to resign after newly released emails showed he circulated material linked to white nationalism to conservative media before joining the administration. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has published summaries of hundreds of emails Miller sent to Katie McHugh, a former editor at Breitbart News.

White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official Mark Sandy, who testified in the impeachment inquiry Saturday, told congressional investigators that he did not know why aid to Ukraine was held up, The New York Times reported, citing two sources.  Sandy also said he had never come across a similar situation during his time with the OMB,

Support among Iowa democratic voters for Democratic presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana Mayor MORE (D) spiked in a new poll released Saturday, with Buttigieg leading the crowded field of Democratic hopefuls.  Among “likely” Democratic voters in the Iowa caucus, 25 percent now say that Buttigieg is their first choice for president, a 16 percent boost since September, according to the latest Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll. This is the first time in the poll that Buttigieg leads Biden, as well as Sens.

A senior White House official told House impeachment investigators last month that MORE's hand-picked ambassador to Europe had pushed — on behalf of Trump himself — for Ukraine's president to launch two investigations that could help Trump politically. Tim Morrison, a top aide at the National Security Council (NSC) who has since departed the agency, said MORE, U.S. ambassador to the E.U., had huddled with a top Ukrainian representative on Sept. 1, when he relayed the message that the release of U.S.