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Sen. Rand Paul tests positive for coronavirus

by Zachary Basu

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has tested positive for the coronavirus, his office announced on Twitter Sunday.

Why it matters: He's the first U.S. senator to test positive. According to his office, Paul is asymptomatic and was not aware of making direct contact with an infected person.

Paul, a licensed physician and notorious deficit hawk, was the only senator to vote against a bipartisan $8 billion deal to provide emergency coronavirus funding earlier this month.

He sought to introduce an amendment that would take the funding from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, but it was voted down 80-16.

Paul may be considered a high-risk patient for coronavirus.
In August 2019, the senator tweeted that he had part of his lung removed during surgery after it was damaged in a 2017 assault by his neighbor.

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Appeals court keeps Flynn case alive, won't order dismissal

ERIC TUCKER

Associated Press August 31, 2020, 12:19 PM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court in Washington on Monday declined to order the dismissal of the Michael Flynn prosecution, permitting a judge to scrutinize the Justice Department's request to dismiss its case against the President Donald Trump's former national security adviser.

The decision keeps the matter at least temporarily alive and rejects efforts by both Flynn's lawyers and the Justice Department to force the prosecution to be dropped without any further inquiry from the judge, who has for months declined to dismiss it.

Federal prosecutors moved in May to dismiss the prosecution even though Flynn had pleaded guilty and admitted lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation about his Russian contacts during the presidential transition period. He was awaiting sentencing when the government asked to dismiss the case.

But U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, signaling his skepticism at the government's motion, refused to immediately grant the request and instead appointed a retired federal judge to argue against the Justice Department's position.

His lawyers then sought to bypass Sullivan and obtain a order from the federal appeals court that would have required the judge to immediately force the judge to dismiss the case.

At issue before the court was not the merits of the Flynn prosecution but rather whether Sullivan could be forced to grant the Justice Department's dismissal request without even holding a hearing to scrutinize the basis for the motion.

“We have no trouble answering that question in the negative,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion for the eight judges in the majority.

Flynn was the only person charged in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation who had been a White House official. Mueller's probe investigated ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

He was questioned by the FBI at the White House, just days after Trump's inauguration, about his conversations with the then-Russian ambassador to the U.S. pertaining to sanctions that had just been imposed by the Obama administration for election interference. The conversation alarmed law enforcement and intelligence officials who were already investigating whether the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia to sway the presidential election in Trump's favor. They were puzzled by the White House's public insistence that Flynn and the diplomat had not discussed sanctions.

But the Justice Department argued in May that the FBI had insufficient basis to interrogate Flynn about that conversation, which Attorney General William Barr has described as fully appropriate for an incoming national security adviser to have had.

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Donald Trump reached the highest job approval rating of his career in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll and runs competitively for re-election against four of five possible Democratic contenders. Yet he remains broadly unpopular across personal and professional measures, marking his vulnerabilities in the 2020 election.

Forty-four percent of Americans approve of Trump’s overall job performance, up a slight 5 percentage points from April and 2 points better than his peak early in his presidency. Still, 53% disapprove, keeping him at majority disapproval continuously for his first two and a half years in office, a record for any president in modern polling.

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WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee will vote Thursday to establish rules for hearings on impeachment, escalating the panel's investigations of President Donald Trump even as many Democrats remain wary of the effort.

The resolution is a technical step, and the panel would still have to introduce impeachment articles against Trump and win approval from the House to bring charges against Trump. It's unclear if that will ever happen, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged caution on the issue, saying the public still isn't yet supportive of taking those steps.

Even if the House did recommend impeachment charges against the president, the Republican-led Senate is unlikely to convict him and remove him from office.

Still, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler has said that the committee will move forward with impeachment hearings this fall, bolstered by lawmakers on the panel who roundly support moving forward. The vote on Thursday will set rules for those hearings, empowering staff to question witnesses, allowing some evidence to remain private and permitting the president's counsel to respond to testimony.

The committee says that the resolution is similar to procedural votes taken at the beginning of the impeachment investigations into Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

"The adoption of these additional procedures is the next step in that process and will help ensure our impeachment hearings are informative to Congress and the public, while providing the president with the ability to respond to evidence presented against him," Nadler said in a statement. "We will not allow Trump's continued obstruction to stop us from delivering the truth to the American people."

The committee has also filed two lawsuits against the administration after the White House repeatedly blocked the panel from obtaining documents and testimony.

Pelosi has said she wants to see what happens in court before making any decisions on impeachment. She said Monday evening that she had signed off on the Judiciary vote, and "that's a logical thing for a committee to establish its rules of procedure."

The first hearing under the new impeachment rules would be with Corey Lewandowski on Sept. 17, the panel also announced Monday. Lewandowski was frequently mentioned in former special counsel Robert Mueller's report, which the committee has been investigating. According to Mueller's report, Trump asked Lewandowski to deliver a message to then- Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking him to limit Mueller's probe.

The committee has also invited two other witnesses mentioned in the report, former White House aides Rick Dearborn and Rob Porter. The White House has previously blocked former employees from testifying, but Lewandowski never officially worked for the White House.

The resolution that the committee will consider Thursday would set parameters for the panel's impeachment hearings in an attempt to give lawmakers more powers to investigate the president. It would allow committee lawyers to question witnesses for an additional hour — 30 minutes for each side — beyond the five minutes allowed for committee lawmakers. Evidence would be allowed in private session to protect the confidentiality of sensitive materials, and any full committee or subcommittee hearing could be designated by Nadler as part of the committee's probe into whether to recommend articles of impeachment.

The procedural vote comes as the panel broadens its impeachment probe beyond Mueller's report, which has consumed most of the committee's energy since it was released in April.