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Updated March 11, 2020, 12:05 PM EDT

The United States now has more than 1,000 people infected with coronavirus — but testing in the U.S. is still ramping up, meaning that number could continue to climb.

Meanwhile, the governor of New York has questioned the number of people who have been tested for the virus in the U.S.

“When they do the retrospective on this one, they are going to say, 'Why did it take the Unites States so long to bring up the testing capacity?'” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on TODAY on Wednesday. On Tuesday, Cuomo announced that he was implementing a "containment area" around a one-mile radius in the city of New Rochelle, home to the largest cluster of coronavirus cases in the country.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said that more than 8,500 specimens have been tested for the coronavirus across the U.S. Because multiple specimens are required from each individual, the number of actual patients who have been tested is likely far lower.

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'Talk with your lawyer, Bill Barr:' Kamala Harris warns Trump against attempt to 'suppress the vote'

William Cummings, USA TODAY

USA TODAY May 26, 2020, 12:52 AM EDT

Sen. Kamala Harris tore into President Donald Trump Wednesday night for his threat to withhold federal funds from states over absentee ballots, warning such an act would be illegal.

"Mr. President, it is a federal crime to withhold money from states with the purpose of interfering with people's right to vote," the former California attorney general told MSNBC host Joy Reid.

"So, you may want to talk to your lawyer, Bill Barr, about that," Harris added, in an apparent swipe at the independence of Attorney General William Barr, whom critics have accused of acting more like the president's personal attorney than the nation's top law enforcement official.

On Wednesday morning, Trump said in a tweet that Michigan had sent millions of voters absentee ballots "illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State."

"I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!" wrote the president, who has railed against efforts to expand mail-in-voting in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The president was referring to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's announcement on Tuesday that absentee ballot applications – not actual ballots – would be sent to all of the state's 7.7 million voters, giving them the option to receive a ballot in the mail to vote in the Aug. 4 primary and Nov. 3 general election, rather than going to a polling place.

While it is illegal in Michigan to send absentee ballots to voters who do not formally request them, it is far from clear that there are the same legal hurdles to sending applications for the absentee ballots to registered voters, though it could be challenged in court.

Trump later deleted the initial tweet to clarify he was referring to applications, and not ballots, though that was the only aspect of the tweet he changed.

"To have this kind of distraction is just ridiculous," Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose state is facing a massive flood on top of the coronavirus pandemic, told "CBS This Morning" on Thursday.

"Threatening to take money away from a state that is hurting as bad as we are right now is just scary, and I think something that is unacceptable," Whitmer said.

The president made a similar threat against Nevada, where Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske has ordered an all mail-in election for the state's June 9 primary – which has no bearing on the presidential race because Nevada held its Democratic presidential caucus in February, and canceled its Republican presidential caucus.

Cegavske, whose decision was upheld by a federal judge earlier this month, defended the move as "necessary and prudent" in order to "protect the health and safety of voters and election workers," in a statement responding to the president's tweet.

"For over a century, Nevadans, including members of the military, citizens residing outside the state, voters in designated mailing precincts, and voters requesting absentee ballots, have been voting by mail with no evidence of election fraud," Cegavske said.

"For the President to threaten federal funding in the midst of a pandemic over a state exercising its authority to run elections in a safe and legal manner is inappropriate and outrageous," said Nevada's Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak in a response to Trump on Twitter.

Trump, who himself votes absentee, has said voting by mail is a "dangerous thing" and "subject to tremendous corruption," despite a lack of evidence that there is a statistically significant amount of fraud in the five states that conduct their elections entirely by mail.

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Published Jan. 14, 2020
Updated Jan. 15, 2020, 7:22 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — New details emerged on Tuesday of President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine, intensifying demands on Senate Republicans on the eve of a historic impeachment trial to include witness testimony and additional documents in the proceeding.

The dozens of pages of notes, text messages and other records lay out work conducted by Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and his associate Lev Parnas on behalf of the president. They include handwritten notes scrawled on a sheet of hotel paper at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Vienna that mention getting President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to announce an investigation of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son.

House Democrats released the records even as Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a Wednesday vote to name House prosecutors and send the articles of impeachment against Mr. Trump to the Senate to begin the trial. The material undergirds the accusations against Mr. Trump, and highlights how much is still to be learned about the scope of a scheme that the impeachment charges call a blatant effort to solicit foreign help in the 2020 election.

The documents, provided by Mr. Parnas, contain a series of exchanges between him and a Ukrainian prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, who was helping Mr. Giuliani unearth damaging information about the Bidens.

In one of the exchanges, from March 2019, Mr. Lutsenko messaged Mr. Parnas on the WhatsApp messaging service to complain that the Trump administration had not yet ousted the United States ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch. Mr. Lutsenko, who had clashed with Ms. Yovanovitch and wanted her gone, appeared to link her removal to his assistance in attacking the Bidens.

“It’s just that if you don’t make a decision about Madam — you are bringing into question all my allegations. Including about B,” he wrote to Mr. Parnas, in apparent references to Ms. Yovanovitch and Mr. Biden.

Mr. Lutsenko added: “And here you can’t even get rid of one fool,” an apparent reference to Ms. Yovanovitch. He also inserted a frowning emoji.

“She’s not a simple fool trust me,” Mr. Parnas responded. “But she’s not getting away.” The president, with Mr. Giuliani’s encouragement, recalled Ms. Yovanovitch from her post in late April.

The Parnas documents also include a May 2019 letter from Mr. Giuliani requesting a meeting with Mr. Zelensky in which he said Mr. Trump had “knowledge and consent” of his actions. It is the first document to be made public to say as much.

Mr. Parnas, who is under federal indictment, has only recently been cleared to hand over the material to Congress, and an official involved in the inquiry indicated more was likely to be made public soon.

Senior Democrats who led the House impeachment inquiry said the new records underscored the need for senators to demand additional evidence at trial. The new documents, they said in a statement, “demonstrate that there is more evidence relevant to the president’s scheme, but they have been concealed by the president himself.”

“There cannot be a full and fair trial in the Senate without the documents that President Trump is refusing to provide to Congress,” they said.

Ms. Pelosi said she would announce the names of her impeachment managers at 10 a.m. Wednesday, and a vote to formally name them and send the articles was scheduled for early afternoon. “The American people deserve the truth, and the Constitution demands a trial,” she said.

In the Senate, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, indicated that senators would be ready to receive the charges on Wednesday and take sworn oaths to render “impartial justice” in the trial shortly thereafter, if not the following day.