Trump-Russia inquiry: Whitaker’s role criticized by Democrats – live | US news

The protest last night outside Tucker Carlson’s home, which Carlson said included banging on and cracking his door, is drawing condemnation including from liberals.

Here’s “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert:

And Media Matters senior fellow Matthew Gertz:

House Democrats plan to restore a Congressional committee on climate change that Republicans had scrapped, the New York Times reports.

Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said she will urge her caucus to bring back the select committee to “prepare the way with evidence” for future legislation to tackle carbon emissions and climate change. It’s just a preliminary step since Democrats are unlikely to be able to pass such legislation with Republicans still in control of the Senate.

Republicans de-funded the panel when they took control of the House.

Christine Blasey Ford continues to receive threats after making sexual assault allegations against supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation process, her lawyers tell NPR.

“Justice Kavanaugh ascended to the Supreme Court, but the threats to Dr Ford continue,” said the lawyers, Debra Katz, Lisa Banks and Michael Bromwich.

Meanwhile, Kavanaugh was welcomed to the court with a ceremonial swearing in Thursday. Donald Trump and his new acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker attended, as did First Lady Melania Trump, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, retired Justice Anthony Kennedy and many of Kavanaugh’s former colleagues, according to the Associated Press.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, hospitalized with fractured ribs, was absent.

Democrat Andrew Gillum, who had conceded to Ron DeSantis in the Florida governor’s race, now says with results tightening there may be a recount.

Twitter has suspended the account of an anti-fascist group that protested outside Tucker Carlson’s Washington DC home Wednesday night, the Washington Examiner reported.

The group Smash Racism DC protested outside the Fox News host’s home, and Carlson said group members pounded on his front door, and one woman threw herself against the door and cracked it.

His wife locked herself in a pantry and called 911, he told the Washington Post.

“I called my wife,” Carlson told the paper. “She had been in the kitchen alone getting ready to go to dinner and she heard pounding on the front door and screaming … Someone started throwing himself against the front door and actually cracked the front door.”

In since-deleted tweets, the group threatened that Carson was “not safe”, according to the Washington Times.

“Every night you spread fear into our homes – fear of the other, fear of us, and fear of them. Each night you tell us we are not safe. Tonight you’re reminded that we have a voice. Tonight, we remind you that you are not safe either,” the tweet said.

“It wasn’t a protest. It was a threat,” Carlson told the Post. “They weren’t protesting anything specific that I had said. They weren’t asking me to change anything. They weren’t protesting a policy or advocating for legislation … They were threatening me and my family and telling me to leave my own neighborhood in the city that I grew up in.”

Senator Bernie Sanders said the results of some of Tuesday’s elections show that many white voters are still “uncomfortable” voting for black candidates.

Sanders was referring to governor’s races in Florida, where Democrat Andrew Gillum lost, and Georgia, where Stacey Abrams is trailing in the vote count though she has not conceded. A third candidate who would have been his state’s first black governor, Ben Jealous in Maryland, also lost.

“I think you know there are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American,” Sanders told The Daily Beast.

“I think next time around by the way it will be a lot easier for them to do that,” he said.

The Vermont senator and 2016 presidential candidate told the Daily Beast Abrams ran a “brilliant campaign” and Gillum is a “fantastic politician”. “He stuck to his guns in terms of a progressive agenda. I think he ran a great campaign. And he had to take on some of the most blatant and ugly racism that we have seen in many many years. And yet he came within a whisker of winning,” he said.

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is being considered to replace Jeff Sessions as attorney general, CBS News reports.

Donald Trump has installed Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general , but a permanent replacement will have to be confirmed by the Senate.

Christie, after running for president in 2016 himself, endorsed Trump and ran his transition, but was ultimately pushed aside.

According to CBS, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, outgoing Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, and former attorney general William Barr are also in the running.

Former New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman will not be criminally charged on accusations he assaulted multiple women, prosecutor Madeline Singas told Newsday and others.

She said that while she believes the allegations are true, “legal impediments, including statutes of limitations, preclude criminal prosecution”.

One of Schneiderman’s alleged victims reacts to the news:

Schneiderman says he accepts responsibility for his behavior and has spent time in rehab.

Barbara Underwood – the acting New York Attorney General who sued Donald Trump over his troubled charity – will stay on in her old role as solicitor general when a new AG takes office in January, her spokeswoman said.

Underwood took over after ex-AG Eric Schneiderman resigned in disgrace over charges he physically abused several women.

She pledged not to run for a full term in the office, and Letitia James, the New York City Public Advocate, won the seat Tuesday.

When James takes over, Underwood will resume her former job as solicitor general.

Republican Brian Kemp, who is leading in election results to become Georgia’s next governor, resigned Thursday as secretary of state.

Kemp’s campaign says he has enough votes to secure victory, but Democrat Stacey Abrams has not conceded. His service as secretary of state – the official who oversees elections – was controversial throughout the race, which featured multiple allegations of voter suppression.

The Associated Press reports:

Attorney Russ Willard with the attorney general’s office of Georgia announced the resignation in federal court Thursday morning.

Willard said Kemp delivered a letter of resignation to Gov. Nathan Deal on Thursday morning, and it is effective at 11:59 a.m.

The state said Kemp will not perform any election-related duties Thursday.

The announcement came ahead of a scheduled hearing Thursday for a lawsuit in which five Georgia voters asked that Kemp be barred from exercising his duties as the state’s chief elections officer in any future management of his own election tally.

Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams has pointed to ballots that have yet to be counted and says there’s still the possibility of a December runoff in one of the nation’s marquee midterm races

In an interview with WSB Radio on Thursday, Kemp said he and his campaign are declaring victory because it isn’t possible for Abrams to pick up enough votes to force a Dec. 4 runoff.

Abrams’ campaign has said there are still enough uncounted votes to force a runoff and that they need to pick up about 15,000 votes to do so.

Kemp said his rival’s campaign is using “old math.” Without providing specifics, he said in the radio interview that the number “is actually more like 30,000 votes.”

The Abrams campaign continues to accuse Kemp of improperly using his current post as secretary of state.

Democrats on the House judiciary committee sent a letter to acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker Thursday demanding to know who is now in charge of the Russia investigation.

Representative Jerrold Nadler, the incoming chair of the judiciary committee after Democrats took control of the House, has vowed to investigate Donald Trump’s firing of Jeff Sessions, who he replaced with Whitaker.

In the new letter, Nadler (D-NY) and other Democrats ask Whitaker to confirm who is currently supervising special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference. They ask whether the justice department has produced a legal opinion on whether an AG not confirmed by the Senate – which Whitaker has not been – is permitted to oversee the investigation.

“It is our strongly considered judgement that the Justice Department should allow Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein to continue to supervise the matter,” they write. “It would of course be wholly inappropriate for you to supervise the investigation, given your well-documented statements regarding the efficacy of the Russia investigation.”

The Democrats ask for rules to be instituted mandating that any report Mueller produces will be made public and ensuring he won’t be terminated minus extraordinary circumstances. They also ask the acting AG to preserve any documents related to Trump’s firing of Sessions for use in a future investigation.

“The forced firing of Attorney General Sessions appears to be part of an ongoing pattern of behavior by the President seeking to undermine investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election,” Nadler and his colleagues wrote.

“President Trump’s actions risk plunging the country into peril, akin to a ‘slow motion Saturday Night Massacre.’ Congress and the Justice Department worked together at that time to avoid a full-fledged constitutional crisis in the Watergate era. It is therefore incumbent that we now set aside any institutional differences we may have and work together to protect our nation and the rule of law from this grave threat.”

The group also wrote to current House judiciary committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) asking for emergency hearings on Sessions’ departure, though it is likely an investigation will wait until the Democrats formally take control in January.

More details on the injuries suffered by supreme court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from the AP:

Ginsburg fell in her office at the supreme court on Wednesday evening, the court said.

She went home after the fall but experienced discomfort overnight and went to George Washington University Hospital early Thursday, where she was admitted. Tests showed she fractured three ribs.

It’s not the first health scare the 85-year-old justice has overcome: she’s had two bouts with cancer and had a stent implanted to open a blocked artery in 2014.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat, has announced his candidacy to be House Democratic caucus chair.

If successful, he would replace fellow New Yorker Joe Crowley, who led the caucus before losing his re-election bid in a primary to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“We have seized the majority; now we must keep it. There is an unconventional President in the Oval Office who dominates the news cycle with his outrageous claims, name-calling and falsehoods. Undoubtedly, he will try to use the House Democratic Caucus as a foil to explain his shortcomings and inability to lead,” Jeffries wrote in a letter to colleagues announcing his candidacy.

“To stay in charge, we must act aggressively on a bold legislative agenda and consistently message to the American people what we are doing to improve their quality of life.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is using an apparently doctored video to justify the decision to revoke the White House press credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta.

Acosta lost his pass after asking a series of pointed questions of Trump at a Wednesday press conference. During the exchange, a female White House staffer approached him and attempted to physically remove a microphone from his hand, while he holds on to it.

Video of the incident makes clear it was the staffer who initiated physical contact, but the White House accused Acosta of “placing his hands on a young woman”. The video shared by Sanders appears to have been sped up, to make Acosta’s arm movements appear more aggressive. Several reporters noted it apparently originated on the conspiracy theory site Infowars.

Democrat Lucy McBath has won a House seat in the Atlanta suburbs, after Republican Rep. Karen Handel conceded a close race Thursday morning.

“After carefully reviewing all of the election results, it is clear that I came up a bit short on Tuesday,” Handel said in a tweet. “Congratulations to Representative-Elect Lucy McBath & I send her only good thoughts and much prayer for the journey that lies ahead for her.”

McBath is a gun control activist who got involved in politics after her son, 17-year-old Jordan Davis, was shot and killed in a gas station parking lot by a white man who objected to loud music he and his friends were playing.

She has said she was motivated to run for office after the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

It’s a big shift for a Congressional seat once held by Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker.

Supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been hospitalized after fracturing three ribs in a fall at court, the Associated Press reports.

The 85-year-old justice is a liberal stalwart on the nation’s highest court.

Good morning and welcome back to our live coverage. Donald Trump’s firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions has thrown into question the fate of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

Democrats, who won control of the House in Tuesday’s election, are vowing to investigate the removal of the attorney general.

Meanwhile, Trump has escalated his attacks on the press, revoking the credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta after a female White House staffer tried to physically remove a microphone from his hand at Wednesday’s press conference.