The closed-door interview with House Oversight Committee Republicans is set to take place in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons have a house.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis isn’t sold on the massive expansion of AI.
And that belief might be his way back to national political relevance.
The Republican governor is appealing to a growing number of people who have concerns that AI’s rapid build-up, fueled in part by taxpayer dollars, could displace jobs, increase energy costs and hurt the environment. DeSantis’ positions stand in direct contrast to the embrace of the AI industry by President Donald Trump and the two likeliest potential candidates to snag his 2028 presidential endorsement: Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“We don’t want to see them building a massive data center and then sending you the bill,” DeSantis said this month when asked about AI companies. “Data centers take up the power equivalent of a half a million-person city. We feel very, very strongly about protecting the consumer.”
Read the full story here.
The new Texas congressional map that kicked off a nationwide redistricting fight last year was designed to boost Republicans in the midterm elections. First, in the primaries, the map is pitting the newest Democrat in Congress against one of his longest-serving colleagues in a primary.
Rep. Christian Menefee took office this month after he won a late January special election to fill the Houston-based seat of Rep. Sylvester Turner, who died last year. But because of the new congressional maps, Menefee is running for a full term in a district composed of a mostly new group of voters. Meanwhile, Rep. Al Green is running in the same district after the Legislature redrew his longtime seat to lean more Republican.
It’s not the only awkward primary matchup forged in part by redistricting. Democratic former Rep. Colin Allred, who endorsed current Democratic Rep. Julie Johnson to succeed him in a Dallas-based district in 2024, is now challenging Johnson after a redistricting shuffle that led two other Democrats from the metro area to leave their seats and Allred to leave the Senate race to seek election to the House once again.
Read the full story here.
The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to immediately allow it to remove protected status from thousands of Syrian immigrants.
Lower courts blocked the move, similar to others the administration has taken as part of its hardline immigration policy.
The Supreme Court last year allowed the administration to remove protected status for people from other countries, including Venezuela.
In the filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer criticized lower courts for repeatedly blocking the administration’s effort to remove what is officially called Temporary Protected Status from various immigrant groups.
People accepted into the humanitarian program have legal status to stay in the United States and can get work authorization. About 6,000 Syrians would be affected if the Trump administration policy goes into effect.
If the Supreme Court does not intervene, judges will “continue to impede the termination of temporary protection that the Secretary has deemed contrary to the national interest, tying those decisions up in protracted litigation with no end in sight,” Sauer wrote.
Cindy McCain announced today that she is stepping down as head of the World Food Programme, citing health issues and expressing that the work has been “the honor of a lifetime.”
“I had truly hoped I could finish out my term, but my health has not recovered to a level that allows me to fully serve the enormous demands of this job,” McCain, 71, said in a statement. “This is one of the most difficult decisions I have ever had to make.”
McCain has served as the executive director of the humanitarian organization, which provides food assistance to more than 100 million people around the world.
The widow of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., she made the decision experiencing in October what her office described as a mild stroke. She resumed her role after weeks of recuperation.
Read the full story here.
Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who served during the first Trump administration, said in a post on X that it was “incomprehensible” that the Senate was considering Dr. Casey Means to be the next surgeon general.
“As a former U.S. Surgeon General who held an active medical license and practiced medicine while in the role (at Walter Reed and aboard the USS Comfort) it is incomprehensible that the Senate is even considering a nominee for this role who lacks any active license and has never practiced unsupervised,” he wrote after Means’ testimony yesterday at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
In a separate post, Adams said he and every prior surgeon general was held to the standard of holding an active medical license. Means’ medical license lapsed in January 2024.
“If the administration lowers (or creates a back door around) those standards, and the Senate confirms Casey Means (who has let her license go inactive and didn’t complete residency), they undermine every argument they’ve made about merit, standards, and opposing ‘DEI’ shortcuts,” Adams said in the post.
Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona, who served in the George W. Bush administration, has also criticized Means. In an op-ed last May, Carmona argued that Means’ “professional qualifications raise significant concerns.”
“Leadership in the Public Health Service must remain merit-based and above politics,” he wrote at the time. “Appointing a nominee who lacks the credentials expected of even entry-level officers in the corps threatens the credibility of this proud institution.”
The House Oversight Committee will conduct depositions with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this morning and former President Bill Clinton tomorrow as part of its probe into the case of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Here’s what you need to know:
The Clintons’ depositions will both be held in Chappaqua, New York, “as an accommodation for their schedules,” the committee spokesperson said. The committee can hold depositions outside of the Capitol.
Police officers stand in the road Thursday near the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center where Hillary Clinton's deposition was held. Charly Triballeau / AFP – Getty Images
With the House done with votes for the week, members of the committee and their staff will be in Chappaqua. Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and ranking member Robert Garcia, D-Calif., have both said they plan to be in attendance. Other members have posted that they are planning to attend. Garcia said Democrats have a “good group going up to New York.”
The depositions will be behind closed doors, so we won’t see anything in the moment. The depositions will be filmed and the committee has been releasing the full videos of depositions soon after they happen.
Committee rules require that witnesses shall be under oath in depositions. The depositions are transcribed, according to rules.
Depositions proceed in one-hour rounds of questioning, alternating between the Republicans and Democrats. So Republicans in the majority will get to ask questions for the first hour and then Democrats in the minority get the second hour. Typically, lawyers for committees lead in asking questions, but members of Congress may ask questions as well.
The effort by the Oversight Committee to question the Clintons as part of the Epstein investigation started in July, when during a hearing of the Federal Law Enforcement Subcommittee, Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., made a motion to subpoena the Clintons along with others like former FBI Director James Comey and former Attorneys General Eric Holder and Merrick Garland as part of the panel’s Epstein probe.
As is the case for voting on motions in hearings, the vote was done by asking for yeas and nays. Democrats in the room, including Garcia, were seen on camera responding “no,” but because no one requested a recorded vote, there is no actual tally.
Comer issued the subpoenas Aug. 5. Both Clintons were scheduled for October depositions originally, but those were moved to December and then to January after the Clintons said they had a funeral to attend that conflicted with the December dates.
Both Clintons failed to appear at their Jan. 13 and 14 depositions. Then on Jan. 21, the committee voted on a bipartisan basis to recommend that the House find the Clintons in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with the subpoenas.
As the House was moving forward with a contempt vote on the floor earlier this month, the Clintons agreed to testify.
The Clintons have repeatedly denied wrongdoing related to Epstein and have not been accused of any crimes in connection with him.
Cross-country memorial services for the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. are set to begin today in Chicago, the city the late civil rights leader called home.
The protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate will lie in repose for two days at the headquarters of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition before events in Washington, D.C., and South Carolina, where he was born.
“The outpouring of love and support received from around the globe has been abundant and deeply felt,” Jackson’s family members said in a recent statement.
Jackson, who died last week at age 84, had been diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder that affected his mobility and ability to speak in his later years.
Read the full story here.
A prominent Supreme Court litigator who also published a popular blog about the nation’s highest court was convicted yesterday of tax evasion and related charges stemming from his secretive lifestyle as an ultra-high-stakes poker player.
A federal jury found SCOTUSblog co-founder Thomas Goldstein guilty of 12 of 16 counts after a six-week trial in Greenbelt, Maryland. Jurors deliberated for approximately two days before convicting Goldstein of one count of tax evasion, four of eight counts of aiding and assisting in the preparation of false tax returns, four counts of willful failure to timely pay taxes, and three counts of false statements on loan applications.
Goldstein was charged with failing to pay taxes on millions of dollars in gambling income. Justice Department prosecutors also accused him of diverting money from his law firm to pay gambling debts and falsely deducting gambling debts as business expenses.
Read the full story here.
In his State of the Union address, Trump seemed to offer another rationale for possible military action against Iran, saying it was working to develop missiles that could “soon” be able to strike the U.S.
“They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” he said.
It was the first time the president or any other U.S. official has portrayed Iran as poised to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. Until now, U.S. intelligence agencies and European governments have said Iran could eventually build an ICBM under the cover of its military space program if it chose to.
But U.S. intelligence and military commanders have not publicly warned of an imminent threat due to a possible ICBM program.
A Defense Intelligence Agency report released last year said Iran “has space launch vehicles it could use to develop a militarily-viable ICBM by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.”
A U.S. official told NBC News that Iran has been building toward an ICBM for years and making advances but that there was no indication of dramatic new progress.
Read the full story here.
The FBI, at the direction of Director Kash Patel, has fired at least a half-dozen agents tied to the 2022 search of Trump’s home in Florida, six people familiar with the matter told NBC News.
Three of the sources said at least 10 employees overall were dismissed, from support personnel to agents and supervisors.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump had faced federal charges in two criminal cases: one over his handling of classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago estate and another in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. A Trump-appointed judge dismissed the classified documents case, while Jack Smith moved to drop the election case when he was special counsel after Trump won a second term in 2024. Trump pleaded not guilty in each case and denied any wrongdoing.
Read the full story here.
Aliyah Rahman, a Minnesota woman whom Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., took as her guest to the State of the Union address Tuesday, needed hospital treatment after she was arrested during the speech, Rahman and Omar said.
Rahman silently stood up during the part of Trump’s speech in which he called on Democrats to restore funding for the Department of Homeland Security. The people around her remained seated. When U.S. Capitol Police approached and asked Rahman to sit down, she refused.
During her conversation with Capitol Police officers, the crowd around her gave a standing ovation, which Rahman tried to explain to the officers was a reason she should not be forced to leave.
Capitol Police took Rahman, who was walking with the help of a crutch, and started pulling her toward the exit — a move that faced protest from one of the other guests in the gallery, who called on the police to be less aggressive with Rahman.
Read the full story here.
A Hong Kong appeals court overturned Jimmy Lai’s 2022 fraud conviction and sentencing today in a rare legal victory for the pro-democracy activist.
Lai, 78, a media tycoon and longtime critic of China’s ruling Communist Party, remains in prison under a 20-year sentence he received this month in a separate national security case.
Though the national security case was the biggest one against Lai, he has faced multiple prosecutions that critics say are part of a broader effort to stamp out dissent in the Chinese territory, a former British colony, after mass pro-democracy protests in 2019.
Lai, a British citizen, had been serving five years and nine months in jail after he was found guilty in October 2022 of violating the lease for Apple Daily, his now-defunct pro-democracy tabloid, by concealing the fact that he was operating a consulting firm on the premises.
Read the full story here.
The United States and Iran were meeting in Geneva today for talks aimed at a diplomatic resolution to their long-running nuclear dispute, as Trump pressures Tehran with the threat of military action.
The talks — a third round of indirect negotiations — had begun as of early this morning, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Trump declared that Iran was working to develop missiles that could “soon” reach the U.S. — his clearest case yet for a possible attack after overseeing a sweeping military buildup in the region.
Iran has consistently denied seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, and has warned of an intense response to even a limited attack by the U.S. or Israel.
Read the full story here.
Members of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee are scheduled to question former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this morning as part of their investigation into the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The closed-door interview, which will be videotaped, is set to take place in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons have a house. The committee will meet with former President Bill Clinton the next day for a similar deposition.
The in-person interviews come after months of bitter back-and-forth between the former first couple and the committee, which at one point threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena it issued in August.
Read the full story here.
NBC News