A White House warning to Democrats claims their planned probes of President Donald Trump's administration — a standard oversight function of Congress — may amount to “blatant criminality.” Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the oversight committee, responded by saying “it appears Donald Trump has something to hide.”
The House has turned aside a resolution to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over his conduct in office and handling of the
war against Iran, which some Republicans blame for sweeping midterm losses.
More than a dozen House and Senate races remain undetermined one week after Election Day. Democrats could have 56 Senate seats when the counting is done in Alaska and Mississippi. Democrats already have 255 seats in the House, their widest majority in decades.
And Sen. Bernie Sanders said he won’t support Sen. Chuck Schumer as majority leader. He said there needs to be a new generation of leadership and a vigorous debate about the Democratic Party’s party’s direction.
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Rep. Robert Garcia, who will likely chair the House Oversight Committee when Democrats take over next year, said Trump “is clearly hiding something” after the White House issued a warning about their planned probes.
“He needs to understand that Congress is a coequal branch of government,” Garcia told reporters outside the Capitol.
GOP Rep. James Comer, the committee’s current chair, said the committee is “very independent” when asked about the White House’s attempt to limit its authority.
“Regardless of who is in the White House, there’s always going to be a strong desire for the Oversight Committee to be a check and balance on the executive branch, regardless of the political scenario,” Comer said.
Trump has told veterans gathered in the amphitheater that service members “are indeed our protection in battle.”
He says military families “are amazing” and are “among the very best of our nation.”
Trump is also recognizing individual veterans and asking them to stand, including a 103-year-old who served in World War II.
It’s business as usual for Trump’s deportation offensive despite the repudiation of voters in a Republican elections wipeout.
In Los Angeles, armored and masked immigration officers blocked a hospital emergency room driveway in a heavily Latino neighborhood. In Alabama, twin 19-year-olds from Venezuela were arrested while driving back to college. And an 8-year-old Haitian boy was taken away from his uncle in San Diego.
After Democrats trounced the GOP, Trump told CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Friday that his crackdown may have been “too tough” and said “I’d love to do something on immigration” with the rival party. But then he announced Stephen Miller, the architect of his hardline immigration agenda, as his new chief of staff.
“Deportations will continue,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin posted the day after the election. “This includes on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Election Day.”
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was forced to relocate to a military base over concerns for his safety after spending months executing a massive economic campaign against Iran aimed at severing all of Tehran’s remaining financial ties around the world.
A person familiar with the matter, who spoke to The Associated Press on Wednesday on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details, said the relocation was partly due to media reports that helped identify Bessent’s home address. The relocation was earlier reported by The New York Times.
Other top Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, live on military bases.
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The president laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown soldier to honor the nation’s veterans. He’ll also deliver remarks at the amphitheater.
Trump’s motorcade took a different route to the revered burial ground instead of traveling over Memorial Bridge and around a traffic circle where he wants to build a triumphal arch.
Trump’s appearance at the cemetery comes a day after nine Kennedy family members joined several lawsuits seeking to block construction, saying the towering 250-foot (76-meter) arch would cast a shadow over their relatives’ gravesites there.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had a positive and constructive phone talk with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday, Chinese state media reported.
Trump is set to travel to Asia next week and meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Wang told Rubio that China is willing to strengthen communications and cooperation with the U.S. and properly handle differences and sensitive issues.
The State Department didn’t immediately release a readout of the call.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent extolled the U.S.-China bond as “one of this century’s most consequential relationships” at a Tuesday night gala in New York with Chinese ambassador to the U.S. Xie Feng.
Democrat Scott Colom was about 3,000 votes ahead of Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith on Wednesday with 98% of the votes counted.
Tuesday was the deadline for receiving mail-in absentee ballots. Counties are required to submit their certified election results — including tallies of provisional ballots — to the state by Friday. It is unclear exactly how many ballots are left to count.
Unlike in some other states, there is no central vote reporting system for Mississippi, and few counties release election results online. Instead, Associated Press journalists and analysts communicate with each of the state’s 82 counties directly for the latest available information on vote counts.
The state will certify its results on Dec. 3.
The AP may declare a winner if it can determine the lead is too large for a recount or legal challenge to change the outcome.
A legal filing by nine members of the Kennedy political dynasty argues that Trump’s plan to build a towering, 250-foot (76-meter) high memorial arch would cast a permanent shadow over their relatives’ gravesites at Arlington National Cemetery, fundamentally altering the experience for visitors.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s health and human services secretary, did not join his relatives’ motion before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who temporarily prohibited the Trump administration last week from breaking ground.
Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Edward M. Kennedy were buried close to the eternal flame marking the gravesite of their slain brother, President John F. Kennedy. The trio of memorials draw millions of people visitors each year.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said it’s unfortunate that “some members of the Kennedy family” are seeking “to politicize a structure designed to unite our nation.”
Kyiv’s delegation was expected to meet later Wednesday with representatives of Europe and NATO who were closed out of the talks. Moscow doesn’t want European countries, which are concerned about Russia’s conduct and broader intentions on the continent, involved in the direct negotiations.
Kushner said a goal of his Moscow meeting Thursday is to get Europeans added to the talks. Both Ukraine and Russia need clarity on postwar security arrangements, and European countries, the EU and NATO have to be involved to build consensus, Kushner said.
“Ukraine’s priority is to end the war as soon as possible with a dignified peace,” Zelenskyy said on X. “We believe that Europe must be represented at every stage of real diplomacy. It is essential that the United States have a strong position and exert influence on the source of this war — that is Russia.”
The session was the first such meeting since February on Russia’s invasion, which analysts and humanitarian organizations say has killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and thousands of civilians.
“One of the positives is we agreed that we’re going to have the biggest humanitarian release of prisoners, which we’re going to finalize the numbers tomorrow,” said Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.
Vladimir Medinsky, the head of the Russian delegation, and Rustem Umerov, who led Kyiv’s contingent, confirmed the planned POW exchange, although Medinsky noted that the agreement was “in principle.”
Kushner said he and U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff will travel to Moscow on Thursday to meet with President Vladimir Putin, then fly to Dublin, Ireland, to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Two days of U.S. mediated talks in Abu Dhabi concluded Wednesday without a major breakthrough announced on ending the conflict that began after Moscow’s full-scale invasion nearly five years ago.
Hopes had been low for any significant development in the first meeting in nine months between the delegations. Russia and Ukraine have from time to time swapped POWs but have remained far apart in their demands for accepting a peace settlement.
U.S. officials say they are determined to revive Washington’s peace efforts that so far have failed to deliver significant results. As well as postwar security guarantees for both countries, other key hurdles are the fate of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory and the role European countries will play in an eventual settlement.
Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a CNN interview that aired Sunday that “there could be” a crime to investigate if rhetoric from Democrats turned threatening, but appeared to strike a more conciliatory tone during an appearance in Missouri this week.
“Congress has oversight authority. It always has, it always will. The Department of Justice, the federal government, works with Congress to address questions they have — whether it’s through subpoenas or letters — so we’re not going to stop working with Congress,” Blanche said. “Nothing I’ve said this weekend, or in the past, should suggest otherwise.”
Democrats have said they want to look into Trump’s real estate projects around the nation’s capital and his crypto dealings with special envoy Steve Witkoff, among other matters.
Rep. Robert Garcia responded to Scharf’s letter, saying that “it appears Donald Trump has something to hide.”
“Congress has wide latitude to conduct investigations and oversight, an authority inherent in the power to legislate,” Garcia wrote.
“The American people voted overwhelmingly for us to pass laws to root out corruption and abuse,” Garcia added.
The White House has issued a warning to Democrats over their planned probes into the Trump administration, going as far as claiming that such investigations — a standard oversight function of Congress — may amount to “blatant criminality.”
White House counsel Will Scharf issued the warning in a letter dated Monday to Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee.
Garcia, who most likely would chair the powerful panel come January, warned Trump officials to “lawyer up” after his party’s stunning victories.
In response, Scharf wrote that “threats to executive branch officials designed to deter them from public service, or process designed merely to abuse or instill fear in the recipient may cross the line into blatant criminality.”
Democrat Mary Peltola led Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan by about 4,250 votes in Alaska’s Senate race on Wednesday morning, with an estimated 84% of the vote counted.
The final absentee ballots mailed back from outside the U.S. are accepted as late as Nov. 18, 15 days after Election Day.
Ranked choice voting could also affect the timeline. Peltola is about 1 percentage point short of the majority needed to win outright. If neither candidate wins a majority, the race will proceed to ranked choice tabulation on Nov. 18. The state’s “target date” for certifying the election results is Nov. 25.
Recounts in Alaska are automatic only in the event of a tie vote. Candidates may also request a recount within five days of the state’s certification.
An Alaska state judge says he expects to issue a swift decision in a lawsuit filed by the campaign of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola.
Her campaign is seeking a comprehensive list of absentee voters whose ballots are being rejected, so it can ensure all qualified voters in last week’s election have their ballots counted as the tallying of absentee, early in-person and other ballots continues.
Attorneys for the state say the information the campaign has requested would violate voter privacy. The campaign of Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan agrees with the state’s position, but says that if the lists are shared, they should be shared equally.
The Senate races in Alaska and Mississippi remain too early to call.
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Publicly available information about Alice Huang is scant. It remains unclear how long her affair with the Nvidia founder lasted.
She was a Chinese finance executive before becoming involved in artificial intelligence, data centers and computer chips.
In 2023, she became a director at Singapore-based Megaspeed, which describes itself as an “NVIDIA cloud partner.” Last year, Megaspeed was accused of skirting of U.S. export restrictions and routing of a large amount of advanced Nvidia chips for Chinese users.
Huang previously held senior positions at the Chinese firm Shanghai Hexi Investment Co. from around 2015 to 2017, according to social media posts and records from Simuwang, a Chinese private equity database. Before that, she worked at HSBC’s Hong Kong private banking arm and at CITIC Securities, a Chinese investment bank.
Beijing has rebutted claims that she was a Chinese spy as “nothing but smears against China.”
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Extramarital affairs are usually private matters. Jensen Huang’s has global implications. The 63-year-old is the leading face of the artificial intelligence revolution with his black leather jackets and fluff of grey hair. His leadership of Nvidia, which produces highly coveted computer chips, has given him a late-night-phone-call relationship with Trump, a promoter of the industry.
But Huang was also liaising with a Chinese businesswoman who has allegedly fed intelligence — as well as advanced chips — to China.
The woman, Alice Huang, is a former executive at the Singapore-based cloud computing company Megaspeed. It’s a saga of personal betrayal, corporate espionage and high-tech development, and the fallout is spreading across Washington, with bipartisan calls for congressional investigations and the Department of Justice opening its own probe.
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U.S. futures are rising with crude still below $100 a barrel as shares of Nvidia stabilize in a brutal week for the chipmaker.
Nvidia was the single heaviest weight on the S&P 500 on Tuesday, but shares are up 3.7% in early trading Wednesday. They are still down almost 10% this week.
The company central to the artificial intelligence boom has been under pressure following revelations of CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with a purported Chinese spy. The company’s board announced an investigation and Trump said the FBI is investigating the affair, which Huang has acknowledged and apologized for.
Ahead of his memoir release, Biden told the magazine that he didn’t know he had cancer while he was president.
“If I had known that I was feeling lousy because I had cancer,” he said, he “would’ve not gone forward, because I don’t think an 80-year-old man with cancer should be running” for president.
Biden was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer months after leaving office. He insisted he was able to perform his duties while he was president.
“I believe that on an objective basis, I was the best-equipped person to do the job,” he said.
Biden argued that age itself — he was 81 in his final year in office — was not disqualifying and meant he had experience and deep personal relationships with world leaders.
His White House memoir, “Promise Me, America,” will be released next Tuesday.
Trump, who for years disputed his loss in the 2020 election and publicly decried the result as having been stolen from him by Democratic forces, privately lauded incoming President Joe Biden as someone he believed would “be true to yourself and the American people.”
That sentiment, along with others, was part of the letter Trump left for Biden upon leaving office in January 2021. Biden showed the note to some members of his staff after his inauguration in 2021 but didn’t let anyone read it, describing it later that day as “very generous” but otherwise saying he considered it to be private.
Inclusion of the letter in Biden’s “Promise Me, America,” his White House memoir slated for release Nov. 17, was first reported Tuesday by The New York Times. The Associated Press has reviewed a photocopy of the two-page letter, handwritten in Trump’s trademark black Sharpie on White House stationery and addressed “To ‘46,’” denoting Biden’s place as the 46th U.S. president.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio has won a party contest to serve as House Republican leader as the party prepares for its new role in the minority and a flurry of Democratic investigations aimed at its standard-bearer in the White House.
Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, defeated Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana in a secret-ballot election of Republicans who will serve in the next Congress. Tuesday's vote was 106-73.
Jordan, 62, co-founded the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus. His candidacy appealed to those looking for new leadership in the wake of last week’s election debacle and to those who like his hard-hitting political style.
Jordan will inherit a historically small House Republican conference that is only beginning to grapple with its loss of power for Trump's final two years in office. Leading the party back to a House majority in 2028 is sure to be a stiff climb, given the scope of Democratic victories.
