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Lois Beckett in San Francisco (now), Amanda Holpuch in New York (earlier) and Joan E Greve in Washington (earlier)

Republicans release 123-page impeachment report defending Trump – as it happened

Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale made the announcement about Bloomberg on Monday.
Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale made the announcement about Bloomberg on Monday. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Live political reporting continues on Tuesday’s blog:

Evening summary

Wrapping up our live coverage for tonight. The president is now in London for the Nato summit as the House intelligence committee prepares to review its report on the impeachment inquiry. Among today’s many impeachment-adjacent developments:

  • House Republicans released a 123-page report defending Trump against the impeachment inquiry against him.
  • Two Giuliani associates will likely face additional charges, a federal prosecutor said in court in Manhattan.
  • A federal judge denied the Trump administration’s attempt to delay an order requiring former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify before Congress.
  • The Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee “thoroughly investigated” and debunked a key GOP talking point about Ukraine and the 2016 election, Politico reported.
  • Attorney general William Barr is signaling that he may publicly disagree with an inspector general’s conclusion, in an independent report, that the FBI had enough information in the summer of 2016 to justify launching an investigation into members of the Trump campaign, the Washington Post reported.
  • Trump’s reelection campaign announced it would no longer credential Bloomberg News reporters after the outlet said it would not investigate its owner, Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire former Republican who recently announced his candidacy for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, or any of Bloomberg’s Democratic rivals, while still continuing to investigate Trump. Trump tweeted angrily that the news agency’s approach was “not O.K.” Many media critics actually agree.
  • Trump said in a tweet that his administration would restore steel and aluminum tariffs on Brazil and Argentina, despite the efforts of Brazil’s far-right president to develop an alliance with Trump.

Report: Barr Signals He Disagrees With Inspector General's Report on FBI

Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, has told associates he disagrees with the Justice Department’s inspector general on a central finding of a forthcoming report — that the FBI had enough information in the summer of 2016 to justify launching an investigation into members of the Trump campaign, the Washington Post reports.

The report from Justice Department’s inspector general Michael Horowitz is expected to be made public in a week.

The inspector general operates independently of Justice Department leadership, so Barr cannot order Horowitz to change his findings, the Washington Post notes.

Democrats have long argued that Barr, who was confirmed as attorney general in early 2019, acts more like the president’s personal attorney than the attorney general of the entire country, and that his behavior is eroding the independence of the Justice Department.

File under Freedom of Information Act victories.

Buzzfeed News is suing the Justice Department to publicly release as many documents as possible generated during the Mueller investigation. The Justice Department released a new batch of documents today: hundreds of pages of summaries of FBI interviews.

Some highlights from the new documents, according to Buzzfeed News:

  • In February 2017, shortly after his inauguration, Trump wanted former New Jersey governor Chris Christie to tell then-FBI director James Comey that “I really like him.” Christie did not do this, he told FBI investigators, saying it “would have been uncomfortable.”
  • On Valentine’s Day 2017, Christie was having lunch with Trump when the president told him, “Now that we fired [former Trump national security adviser Michael] Flynn, the Russia thing is over.” Christie told the FBI that he laughed and said “No way. We’ll be here on Valentine’s Day 2018 talking about this.”
  • Deputy campaign manager Rick Gates told the FBI that “while Paul Manafort was running Trump’s campaign, Manafort had pushed the unfounded theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers.” Trump still cites this debunked theory, as Buzzfeed notes— and did so during the summer 2019 call with the Ukrainian President that’s at the center of the current impeachment inquiry.

Donald Trump’s actions towards Ukraine were “entirely prudent” and involved “no quid pro quo, bribery, extortion, or abuse of power”, according to a draft Republican report on last month’s impeachment inquiry hearings.

The report provides a blueprint for House Republicans to defend the US president at Wednesday’s judiciary committee hearing and for their Senate counterparts to acquit him in a trial.

It also directly contradicts the testimony of career diplomats and makes little attempt to get to grips with the devastating evidence of Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, who spoke about the existence of a quid pro quo, or Fiona Hill, former top Russia expert at the White House, who warned against falling for Moscow’s propaganda about Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election.

Earlier today, Donald Trump’s re-election campaign announced it will no longer issue press credentials to reporters for Bloomberg News, the agency owned by billionaire Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg, after it announced a controversial plan for how it would continue to cover American politics while its owner was running for president.

Trump added his own aggrieved tweet on the situation this afternoon, shortly after arriving in the United Kingdom for a NATO meeting. He complained that “Mini Mike Bloomberg has instructed his third rate news organization not to investigate him or any Democrat, but to go after President Trump, only” and that this was “not O.K.!”

While generally hostile to the existence of an independent press, Trump is not alone in his opinion that Bloomberg News’ currently approach to managing a massive conflict of interest is “not O.K.”

Bloomberg News’ editor-in-chief announced in late November that the agency’s reporters would still cover polls, policies and how the Bloomberg campaign is faring. But Bloomberg News’ reporters would not do investigative stories on Bloomberg or any other Democratic contender for president, he told the agency’s journalists, while still recapping others’ investigations of Democratic contenders and continuing to investigate the Trump administration.

Multiple former Bloomberg editors called the coverage plan unsatisfying and inappropriate.

Margaret Sullivan, a prominent Washington Post media columnist and the former public editor of The New York Times, wrote that the initial coverage plans “put Bloomberg’s many talented journalists, especially those in Washington and New York, in a compromised position.”

Sullivan and others have argued that a better plan would have been for Bloomberg himself to have “entirely recused himself from decision-making or influence at the news organization — saying, in effect, ‘cover me like anyone else and do it with journalistic integrity.’”

But that’s not what the billionaire former mayor of New York City has decided to do.

Sullivan noted that Bloomberg “half-jokingly” told a radio interviewer last year, “Quite honestly, I don’t want all the reporters I’m paying to write a bad story about me. I don’t want them to be independent.”

For Sullivan, Bloomberg’s approach highlighted a similarity between the new 2020 Democratic contender and Trump:

“We already have a rich-guy president who thinks the tried-and-true rules that underpin our democracy aren’t made for him and who doesn’t exhibit a core understanding of the accountability role of an independent press,” she wrote.

Updated

A month after dropping out of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, and after pledging he would not run for senate as a challenger to Texas Republican John Cornyn, Beto O’Rourke is focusing on state-level politics in Texas, the Houston Chronicle reports.

O’Rourke is trying to use some of his political capital to help flip the Texas House of Representatives from Republican to Democratic control.

House Republicans Release Impeachment Report Defending Trump

As House Democrats push forward with their impeachment inquiry, House Republicans have released a 123-page report defending President Donald Trump.

Washington journalists called the GOP report a “pre-buttal to the Democrats’ not-yet-drafted articles of impeachment” and a “full-throated defense” of the president’s dealings with Ukraine.

You can read the report here.

Judge Denies Trump Attempt to Delay McGahn testimony

U.S. District Judge Kentanji Brown Jackson has denied the Trump administration’s request to stay an order requiring former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify before Congress while the administration appeals Jackson’s ruling to a higher court.

“Further delay of the Judiciary Committee’s enforcement of its valid subpoena causes grave harm to both the Committee’s investigation and the interests of the public more broadly,” Jackson wrote, noting also that delaying McGahn’s testimony “would impede an investigation that a committee of Congress is undertaking as part of an impeachment inquiry.”

The judge made clear that McGahn may still invoke executive privilege and refuse to answer Congressional questions during his testimony, but had previously rejected the Trump Justice Department’s argument that the president could give senior aides immunity from having to testify at all.

What additional charges might Giuliani allies Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman face from federal prosecutors?

A prosector said during a hearing today in Manhattan that additional charges were “likely.”

A Florida reporter suggests these charges might involve donations Parnas and Fruman made to Republicans in Florida: Ron DeSantis, now the state’s governor; Rick Scott, the former governor and now one of Florida’s senators, and Brian Mast, one of the state’s members of Congress.

Report: Republican committee debunked GOP Ukraine claim

As the impeachment inquiry into Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president continues, Trump’s Republican allies have repeatedly claimed that the Ukrainian government tried to meddle in the 2016 election to favor Hillary Clinton.

That claim was “thoroughly investigated” and debunked by the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee, Politico reports. The committee “found no evidence that Ukraine waged a top-down interference campaign akin to the Kremlin’s efforts to help Trump win in 2016.”

More from Politico here.

For Giuliani associates, 'an upgraded indictment likely'

More details from federal court in Manhattan: A prosecutor said an upgraded indictment is likely in the criminal case against two Rudy Giuliani associates with ties to Ukraine, the Associated Press reports.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Douglas Zolkind made the prediction during a pretrial hearing Monday in the case against Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. The men are charged with using foreign money to make illegal campaign contributions. Prosecutors say the donations were made while the men were lobbying U.S. politicians to oust the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

The arrest of Parnas and Fruman brought new scrutiny to Giuliani, a former New York City mayor who is President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. Giuliani has tried to get Ukrainian officials to investigate the son of Trump’s potential Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. Giuliani has said he knew nothing about illegal campaign donations.

The Trump administration has quietly released more than $100 million in military assistance to Lebanon after months of unexplained delay, the Associated Press reports.

The White House has yet to offer any explanation for the delay, despite repeated queries from Congress. Officials familiar with the matter told the Associated Press that, unlike Ukraine, there has been no suggestion that President Donald Trump is seeking “a favor” from Lebanon in exchange for the aid.

Democrats have released a list of witnesses for Wednesday’s hearing to review the evidence for impeaching the president, The Hill’s Olivia Beavers reports:

Georgia’s Republican governor is ignoring Donald Trump’s preference and appointing a financial services executive, Kelly Loeffler, to fill the senate seat left vacant when Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson retires for health reasons at the end of the year, according to news reports.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which broke the story, has more background on Loeffler, a multimillionaire with a history of donating to Democratic politicians.

Loeffler, the female CEO of a bitcoin business, is not beloved by more conservative Republican politicians in Georgia. But political analysts in the state see her as potentially “able to bring back suburban women who have left the Republican Party during the Trump administration,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. Her personal wealth is also seen as a useful asset in funding the special election campaign to fill Isakson’s seat over the longer term.

In her application for the open senate job, Loeffler wrote that she would be a staunch ally of Trump, something conservatives have said they doubt.

“If chosen, I will stand with President Trump...to Keep America Great,” Loeffler wrote, according to Politico. “Together, we will grow jobs, strengthen the border, shutdown drug cartels and human traffickers, lower health care costs, and protect our national interests — at home and abroad.”

Trump wanted Georgia’s Republican governor to appoint Rep. Doug Collins, who is currently the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, who “could have been a potentially critical juror in any Senate impeachment trial,” Politico reported.

Isakson, 74, has been struggling with Parkinson’s disease.

At a court hearing in Manhattan, a federal prosecutor said there will “likely” be additional charges in the case against two associates of Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, Bloomberg News reports.

The two men pleaded not guilty in October to charges that they used foreign money to make illegal campaign contributions to politicians and committees to advance their business interests.

This is Lois Beckett, taking over our live politics coverage from our West Coast bureau.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom will travel to Iowa to campaign for Sen. Kamala Harris in mid-December as she tries to rebound amid a critical stretch in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Associated Press reports.

Harris has staked her campaign on a strong showing in Iowa and recently spent six days over the Thanksgiving holiday campaigning in the state. But she’s still stuck in single digits in most polls, far from the top of the pack that includes former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

More from Free, Melania, of which the Guardian has obtained a copy.

CNN reporter Kate Bennett wrote that the first lady suspected Trump ally and adviser, Roger Stone, was responsible for the release of nude photos from her modelling past during the 2016 presidential campaign:

Melania has not commented on how she thinks they got into the hands of the tabloid and on to the cover, but friends say she still refuses to believe Trump would do that to her. As for Stone, she’s not so sure.

The White House did not respond directly to the allegation, but said the book includes “many false details and opinions.”

Roger Stone’s wife, Nydia, told the Guardian via text that the allegation was “categorically false and completely illogical.”

Roger Stone is awaiting sentencing after being found guilty of obstructing the Mueller investigation.

An unauthorized biography of the first lady, Free, Melania, is being released this week, authored by CNN reporter Kate Bennett.

Per CNN, takeaways from the book include:

  • Melania Trump has “frequent, opinionated discussions” with the president, oftentimes more than once a day, via telephone, about policy.
  • The first couple doesn’t share a bedroom.
  • Melania Trump investigated dog breeds and the what types of care a presidential pup would need, but the family ultimately decided not to get a pet – the first White House family to not have one for the past three decades of first families.

California representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican, will plead guilty to campaign finance violations in federal court tomorrow, reversing his previous not guilty position.

His wife, Margaret Hunter, has already plead guilty in the case, which included her admission in a plea agreement that the family spent $500 in campaign funds to fly the family’s pet rabbit, Eggburt, across the country. The couple is alleged to hae spent more than $200,000 in campaign donations on family expenses such as vacations and groceries, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Ahead of Trump’s visit to the UK, five political party leaders in the country expressed concern about prime minister Boris Johnson’s relationship with the US president in a television debate last night.

“We obviously have a hugely important relationship with the US.” said Jo Swinson, the Lib Dem leader. “But make no mistake, the current occupant of the White House is not somebody who shares our values.”

Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit party, was the only of seven candidates to defend the president, describing Trump as “our most important friend in the world.” The representative for the Conservative party, Rishi Sunak, tried to stay out of the fray.

Meanwhile, 350 leading climate researchers urged Johnson to challenge Trump on his “dangerous” denial of the risks of climate change in a letter tied to the US president’s visit.

And the Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, urged the prime minister to break off trade talks with Trump until any reference to pharmaceuticals is struck off the US list of objectives.

Afternoon summary

Here’s where the day stands so far:

  • Trump’s reelection campaign announced it would no longer credential Bloomberg News reporters after the outlet said it would not investigate its owner, Michael Bloomberg, or any other Democratic presidential candidate.
  • The president is headed to London for the Nato summit as the House intelligence committee prepares to review its report on the impeachment inquiry.
  • Trump said in a tweet that his administration would restore steel and aluminum tariffs on Brazil and Argentina, despite the efforts of Brazil’s far-right president to develop an alliance with Trump.
  • Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer whose anti-Trump texts with former FBI agent Peter Strzok intensified the president’s accusations of a “deep state” biased against him, spoke out for the first time in a Daily Beast interview. Page said she decided to do the interview because she wanted to “take my power back.”

My colleague Amanda Holpuch will steer the blog for the next few hours, so stay tuned for more updates from her.

Bloomberg News justified its decision to continue investigating Trump, even as it abandoned investigating Democratic presidential candidates, by arguing that the outlet must scrutinize the current government, which the sitting president leads.

However, that argument sparked some pushback from media commentators, who warned of a double standard in Bloomberg’s political coverage.

Senator Ted Cruz came to Trump’s defense after the president’s reelection campaign announced it would no longer credential Bloomberg News reporters for rallies or other events.

The Texas Republican claimed the outlet’s new policy of not investigating Michael Bloomberg or other Democratic presidential candidates as it continues to cover Trump in the same manner equated to conducting opposition research against Republicans.

Bloomberg News’ editor-in-chief has pushed back against the Trump campaign’s claim that the outlet’s editors have “declared their bias openly” by saying reporters would not investigate Michael Bloomberg or any other Democratic presidential candidate.

The Trump campaign’s announcement sparked questions about covering the president’s rallies, given that Bloomberg is one of three outlets that consistently travel to the events.

Shortly after Michael Bloomberg announced he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News sent a memo to staff outlining how the outlet would cover its owner.

“So Mike is running,” John Micklethwait wrote in the memo. “There is no point in trying to claim that covering this presidential campaign will be easy for a newsroom that has built up its reputation for independence in part by not writing about ourselves (and very rarely about our direct competitors). No previous presidential candidate has owned a journalistic organization of this size.”

Micklethwait said Bloomberg would suspend its editorial board but would strive to report on the billionaire’s campaign as it did everyone else’s. “We will describe who is winning and who is losing,” Micklethwait said. “We will look at policies and their consequences. We will carry polls, we will interview candidates and we will track their campaigns, including Mike’s.”

But the announcement that Bloomberg News would not investigate its owner or any other Democratic presidential candidate sparked outrage from some media commentators -- and now from Trump’s reelection campaign.

Trump campaign no longer credentialing Bloomberg News reporters

Trump’s reelection campaign has just released a statement saying it will no longer issue credentials to Bloomberg News reporters for rallies or other events after the outlet announced it would not investigate Michael Bloomberg or other Democratic presidential candidates in light of the billionaire’s campaign launch.

“Bloomberg News has declared that they won’t investigate their boss or his Democrat competitors, many of whom are current holders of high office, but will continue critical reporting on President Trump,” campaign manager Brad Parscale said in the statement.

“Since they have declared their bias openly, the Trump campaign will no longer credential representatives of Bloomberg News for rallies or other campaign events. We will determine whether to engage with individual reporters or answer inquiries from Bloomberg News on a case-by-case basis. This will remain the policy of the Trump campaign until Bloomberg News publicly rescinds its decision.”

Trump applauds Senate Republican who peddled Ukraine conspiracy theory

Trump, who is en route to London for the Nato summit, is tweeting from Air Force One and applauding senator John Kennedy, who once again peddled a baseless conspiracy theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election while appearing on “Meet the Press” yesterday.

“Thank you to Great Republican @SenJohnKennedy for the job he did in representing both the Republican Party and myself against Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd on Meet the Depressed!” Trump tweeted.

Kennedy told host Chuck Todd yesterday, “I think both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.” However, the US intelligence community has only concluded that Russia did so, and intelligence officials have reportedly briefed senators about the Kremlin trying to frame Ukraine for the election meddling.

During a public impeachment hearing earlier this month, Fiona Hill, the White House’s former top expert on Russia, said the baseless accusation against Ukraine was “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services.”

“I wasn’t briefed,” Kennedy told Todd yesterday. “Dr. Hill is entitled to her opinion.”

Pete Buttigieg has released his first statewide television ad in South Carolina, which will start to air in the early voting state tomorrow as the Democratic presidential candidate makes his seventh trip there.

Buttigieg’s campaign is spending $2 million on the TV ad buy as the Indiana mayor struggles to win over voters in South Carolina. A recent poll showed Buttigieg hitting 6% in the state, but he attracted almost 0% of the support of African Americans, who made up more than half of the state’s 2016 primary electorate.

The video itself takes excerpts from Buttigieg’s speech at the Liberty and Justice Dinner in Des Moines last month. “In our White House, you won’t have to shake your head and ask yourself, ‘Whatever happened to, ‘I was hungry and you fed me. I was a stranger and you welcomed me?’” Buttigieg says in the ad.

“When I say we’ve got to unify the American people it doesn’t mean pretending that we’re all the same. It means unifying around issues from wages and family leave to gun violence and immigration. The hope of an American experience defined not by exclusion but by belonging.”

Former FBI lawyer smeared by Trump speaks out

Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer whose anti-Trump text messages have been used by the president to claim the existence of a “deep state” within the federal government, has spoken out for the first time in a Daily Beast interview.

“I had stayed quiet for years hoping it would fade away, but instead it got worse,” Page said. “It had been so hard not to defend myself, to let people who hate me control the narrative. I decided to take my power back.”

The president has repeatedly mocked Page and Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who had an extramarital affair with her, and pointed to their critical messages as proof that the bureau was biased against Trump.

However, the justice department’s inspector general has reportedly concluded that Page did not conduct herself unprofessionally while working on the bureau’s Russia investigation.

“While it would be nice to have the IG confirm publicly that my personal opinions had absolutely no bearing on the course of the Russia investigations, I don’t kid myself that the fact will matter very much for a lot of people,” Page said. “The president has a very loud megaphone.”

Trump misrepsents Ukrainian president's Time interview

Speaking to reporters before he left for London, Trump falsely claimed the Ukrainian president had cleared him of wrongdoing in a recent interview with Time magazine.

“The Ukrainian president came out and said very strongly that President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong. That should be case over,” Trump told reporters. “But it will never end it because [Democrats] want to do what they want to do.”

In reality, Volodymyr Zelenskiy criticized Trump for holding up Ukraine’s military assistance and said that the US president had harmed his country’s economic propsects by calling it corrupt.

“Look, I never talked to the President from the position of a quid pro quo. That’s not my thing,” Zelenskiy told Time magazine. “But you have to understand. We’re at war. If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us. I think that’s just about fairness. It’s not about a quid pro quo. It just goes without saying.”

Zelenskiy added that Trump’s claims of corruption in Ukraine could spook companies with capital in the country. “The United States of America is a signal, for the world, for everyone,” the Ukrainian president said. “When America says, for instance, that Ukraine is a corrupt country, that is the hardest of signals.”

Trump briefly took questions from reporters before flying to London for the Nato summit, and the president said the Hong Kong bill he just signed could complicate efforts to secure a trade deal with China.

Trump signed the bill on Wednesday after much speculation about whether or not he would put his name to it. But the president didn’t have much choice because the legislation, which signaled support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and authorized sanctions against officials trying to suppress the demonstrations, passed both chambers of Congress with veto-proof majorities.

Trump restores tariffs on Brazil and Argentina

In addition to tweeting complaints about the impeachment inquiry, Trump was also taking care of some trade business this morning -- restoring tariffs on steel and aluminum from Brazil and Argentina.

The president blamed the two countries’ depreciating currencies for harming the prospects of US steel and once again urged the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.

The announcement marks a defeat for Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s right-wing president who appeared to have developed an alliance with Trump. But their shared conservative beliefs were apparently not enough to protect Brazil from these tariffs.

White House will not participate in House judiciary committee hearing

The White House announced last night that Trump would not send a lawyer to represent him at the House judiciary committee’s first impeachment hearing, which will take place Wednesday and focus on the constitutional standard for impeaching a president.

“We cannot fairly be expected to participate in a hearing while the witnesses are yet to be named and while it remains unclear whether the Judiciary Committee will afford the President a fair process through additional hearings,” White House counsel Pat Cipollone said in a letter to committee chairman Jerry Nadler.

“More importantly, an invitation to an academic discussion with law professors does not begin to provide the President with an semblance of a fair process. Accordingly, under the current circumstances, we do not intend to participate in your Wednesday hearing.”

The House intelligence committee is expected to transmit its report on the impeachment inquiry to the judiciary committee tomorrow, after the panel holds a vote on approving its findings. The timeline keeps the House on track to hold a vote on impeaching Trump by the end of the year, followed by a Senate trial in January.

Senate Republicans and the White House have reportedly discussed keeping the trial to two weeks, which means Trump would likely be acquitted before Democrats kick off their presidential primary in February.

Nearly everyone in Washington is betting that Trump will be impeached by the Democratic-controlled House before being acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate. Even if Republicans didn’t control the Senate, it would take a two-thirds majority to remove Trump from office, which seems highly unlikely.

Like the president, House speaker Nancy Pelosi is abroad this week, attending the UN climate change conference in Madrid as Trump participates in the Nato summit in London.

Pelosi is leading a delegation of 14 other Democrats to the 2019 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. “It is a privilege to accompany a high-level Congressional delegation to Spain to combat the existential threat of our time: the climate crisis,” Pelosi said in a Saturday statement announcing the trip.

During a news conference this morning, the House speaker specified that she would not discuss the impeachment inquiry while she was abroad.

Two more Democrats exit 2020 race

The field of candidates chasing the Democratic presidential nomination has (slightly) narrowed with the withdrawals of Montana governor Steve Bullock and former Pennsylvania caongressman Joe Sestak.

Neither Bullock nor Sestak were major players in the race, attracting nearly no support in polls and consistently failing to qualify for debates. (Bullock participated in one debate back in July, and Sestak never managed to qualify.)

Bullock argued he could capture Democrats’ attention without partcipating in the debates by touting his repeated victories in a state Trump safely carried in 2016, but the Montana governor failed to break through as the presidential field has remained crowded.

“While there were many obstacles we could not have anticipated when entering this race, it has become clear that in this moment, I won’t be able to break through to the top tier of this still-crowded field of candidates,” Bullock said in a statement announcing his decision.

Even with the withdrawals of Bullock and Sestak, 16 candidates remain in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, with just two months left until the Iowa caucuses.

Trump heads to London as impeachment threat looms

Good morning, live blog readers!

It will be a busy (and nerve-wracking) week for Donald Trump as the president heads to London for a Nato summit and awaits the release of the House intelligence committee’s report on the impeachment inquiry.

Members of the intelligence committee are expected to receive a draft of the report today and will have 24 hours to review it, with a vote on approving the findings likely to take place tomorrow.

This will leave enough time for the report to be transmitted to the House judiciary committee before the panel holds its first public impeachment hearing on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Trump will be in London to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Nato, an alliance whose value he has repeatedly questioned. But if history is any indication, the president can be expected to weigh in on the progress of the impeachment inquiry by tweeting from the other side of the pond.

A combination picture shows Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman exiting court in Manhattan.
A combination picture shows Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman exiting court in Manhattan. Photograph: Reuters Staff/Reuters

Here’s what else the blog is keeping an eye on today:

  • Trump will depart the White House for London at 9:45 a.m. ET.
  • A status conference will be held for Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, Rudy Giuliani’s former associates who are facing federal campaign-finance charges.
  • Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren will campaign in Iowa, with the state’s caucuses now two months away.

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

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