Adam B Schiff

Democratic lawmakers criticized President Donald Trump on Monday for seeming to siding with Saudi King Salman, who denied during a phone call with the president that his government was involved in the disappearance of a Washington Post journalist. 

Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was born in Saudi Arabia, has been critical of Salman in his writings. He has not been seen or heard from since entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

President Donald Trump on Monday ordered the immediate declassification of redacted materials in the FBI’s 2017 application to spy on Carter Page, as well as various FBI reports of interviews related to that matter including ones conducted with DOJ official Bruce Ohr.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced the decision in a statement Monday noting Trump’s decision comes “at the request of a number of committees of Congress, and for reasons of transparency.”

The House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees’ investigation into possible bias among top Department of Justice and FBI officials appears to rely on an invalid subpoena, five previous House general counsels wrote in a letter to the leaders of the Judiciary Committee.

That would jeopardize any court proceedings that could arise from it — including charging Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for contempt of Congress, a threat issued in July by House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows of North Carolina.

Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, plans to release the transcripts of dozens of private interviews from the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

With midterms coming up, the California Republican said, he wants to work quickly in the coming weeks to make unclassified interviews from the probe public and have Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats declassify the others.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is unlikely to release its final report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election until after the midterms this November, Vice Chairman Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the committee, said.

Warner and his colleagues are still wending their way down a list of people they’d like to interview, he said, including Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who was sentenced to 14 days in prison last week for lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russians while he was working on the campaign.

Rep. Darrell Issa said career Justice Department official Bruce Ohr gave members of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees some “solid information” on Tuesday as they investigate potential bias at the top echelons of U.S. law enforcement.

Besides Issa, a former chairman of the Oversight panel, other attendees at the hearing included Reps. Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the respective current and former chairmen of the hard-line conservative House Freedom Caucus. 

It’s not that Democrats would never try to impeach President Donald Trump. It’s that they just don’t want to talk about it — yet.

Under oath in a New York courtroom last Tuesday, the president’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, implicated his old boss in a crime, saying Trump directed him to violate campaign finance laws by paying off two of his mistresses, including adult film actress and director Stormy Daniels, with thousands of dollars in hush money.

As Donald Trump began to speak Tuesday evening at a political rally in West Virginia, there was a problem with his microphone. In a way, it was a fitting moment near the end of a very rough day for the president.

Trump lost Tuesday on optics alone. And the fallout from two dramatic court scenes could deliver him legal and political headaches — though he has a certain Teflon quality that allows him to absorb negative developments and retain support of around 40 percent of the U.S. electorate.

Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, was found guilty on eight counts of tax evasion and bank fraud, a jury in Virginia declared Tuesday.

Manafort faces up to 80 years in prison pending a sentencing hearing with Judge T.S. Ellis III.

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for an attack in Tajikistan that killed Washingtonians Lauren Geoghegan and Jay Austin.

Geoghegan, 29, interned for Rep. Adam Schiff when she was in college at Georgetown University, NPR reported.