Mark Meadows

After weeks of “no quid pro quo” with Ukraine replacing “no collusion” with the Russians in President Donald Trump’s responses to the investigations into his administration, Mick Mulvaney, his acting chief of staff, said there was a quid pro quo.

Then he and the White House spent the following hours Thursday trying to put that genie back in the bottle. But, in true Trump-style, his 2020 campaign decided to capitalize on the press conference by selling a T-shirt emblazoned with one of the more memorable lines from Mulvaney’s press conference.  

OPINION — In the summertime, Baltimore can be hot as blazes with humidity to match. Trying to cool off in a public pool would be quite an ordinary outing for an 11-year-old boy. But for young Elijah Cummings in 1962, it turned into a nightmare in the still largely segregated city. White adults and children resisting integration yelled, “Go back to where you came from” — sound familiar? — to children and, over the heads of a police line, threw rocks and bottles, one of which caught young Elijah in the face.

That day taught Cummings he had rights, he later said, and it made him determined to become a lawyer despite teachers who dismissed his dream as impossible. With strong parents and supporters such as his boss at a drug store, who paid his college admission fee, Cummings fulfilled that dream and so much more.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, who died Thursday after longtime health complications, threaded a needle that few recent chairmen and chairwomen of high-profile investigative committees have been able to manage: He remained widely popular among his colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

As chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform over the last 10 months and a key player in the ongoing impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, Cummings has been on the receiving end of a stream of invective from a frustrated White House.

Mark Meadows’ gaze was scrupulously trained on Adam B. Schiff.

On Oct. 3, after deposing a former Trump official for hours, Schiff, the House Intelligence chairman, emerged from a secure room in the Capitol’s basement and addressed a waiting television camera.

The 11th-hour cancellation of testimony of a key player in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump threw Democrats into an uproar with one suggesting it was another piece of evidence of the president obstructing justice.

The Democratic chairmen of the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees on Tuesday evening made good on a plan to subpoena Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, for his testimony and documents.

President Donald Trump on Friday declared his requests that foreign governments investigate his domestic political foes are in bounds, and said a probe of the Bidens would not be required of China before a possible trade deal is finalized.

His comments came as Republican and Democratic lawmakers sparred over text messages released late Thursday night showing U.S. diplomats in Ukraine discussing offers to — and demands of — that country’s new government for a pledge to probe former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in return for diplomatic prizes President Volodymyr Zelenskiy desperately wanted from Trump.

It may be recess, but the Hill was full of reporters and members of the House committees that began an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. 

Roll Call hit the road to visit Democratic town halls in Pennsylvania and Virginia. In Allentown, Pa., Rep. Susan Wild got questions about whether she’d be working on anything other than impeachment. While Rep. Elaine, Luria of Virginia’s 2nd District — which Trump won in 2016 — faced little opposition over her support of the impeachment probe. 

Allegations that Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao used her office to help the shipping company owned by her father and sister are “simply false,” a Transportation Department official told the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Monday.

Adam Sullivan, the departments’s assistant secretary of governmental affairs, said in a letter to Chairman Elijah E. Cummings that Chao is not involved with the management or operations of her family’s shipping company, Foremost Group, and does not have a financial stake in the company.

President Donald Trump has no plans to hire a team of lawyers and communicators to fire back at House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, aides say. Instead, he’s already acting as a one-man war room.

Several White House officials signaled Friday the president had little interest in building a rapid-reaction team like President Bill Clinton did when he faced impeachment. Then, senior White House counselor Kellyanne Conway used a combative gaggle outside the West Wing to all but confirm that.

Climate change remains a deeply divisive term in some corners of Capitol Hill, but lawmakers from both parties are embracing the concept of “resilience” — building infrastructure engineered to better withstand devastating wind and floods associated with a warming planet.

The idea of building infrastructure better equipped to deal with natural disasters is appealing to fiscal conservatives who are loathe to keep spending taxpayer dollars rebuilding federal infrastructure just to see it destroyed again.