Donald Trump has threatened to cut school funding for areas that refuse to reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic, adding he disagrees with the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “very tough” and “expensive” guidelines.In other news, key impeachment witness Alexander Vindman announced his retirement from the army by citing “intimidation” led by Mr Trump. ”The president of the United States attempted to force Lieutenant Colonel Vindman to choose: Between adhering to the law or pleasing a president,” Colonel Vindman’s lawyer said.

Van Drew was elected in 2018 to represent the south Jersey district as a Democrat, but switched parties in late 2019​ after voting against impeachment.

Members of Congress were consumed last week with reports that the Russian government was paying bounties to Taliban militants who killed U.S. troops overseas. But they now appear poised to do little — if anything — about it.

Citing disputed intelligence assessments and interagency squabbles, lawmakers emerged from top secret briefings cautious and mostly tight-lipped about the veracity of news reports suggesting that the Russians had American blood on their hands.

Those lawmakers — mostly Republicans — repeatedly stressed that there was no consensus on whether the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence unit, orchestrated the bounties, despite news reports from The New York Times and others that have detailed the alleged scheme with increasing specificity.

“I think there are contradictory pieces of intelligence on this,” Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, the No. 4 GOP leader and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said after a classified briefing.

The Trump administration also appeared to sow doubt over the issue, with President Donald Trump and his aides either questioning the accuracy of the intelligence or labeling reporting on the bounties an outright hoax. And congressional Republicans recently rejected an amendment to the annual defense policy bill, written by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), that would impose new sanctions on Moscow.

Democrats and Republicans alike have supported stricter sanctions on Russia as punishment for its malign activities, including its interference in the 2016 election and its annexation of Crimea in 2014. But the Trump administration has repeatedly hesitated to fully deploy the sanctions regime Congress authorized in 2017, and Republicans have rarely used their leverage to press the White House on the issue.

“There’s still a whole series of questions about what our policy is vis-à-vis Russia, and why there seems to be this unwillingness to call out Russian bad actions,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

The stalemate underscores the difficulties lawmakers face in confronting an increasingly emboldened Russia — especially in an election year, when Republicans are unlikely to publicly break with the president, who has sought to maintain a good relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin even as he continues to alarm some in the GOP with his deferential posture toward the Russian leader.

“I’m interested in hearing an administration speak clearly about their plans that aren’t just hypothetical sanctions sometime out in the future, but what should we be doing now to make the GRU have more doubts about their behavior not just in Afghanistan, but more broadly across the globe,” said Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), an outspoken Russia hawk who sits on the Intelligence panel.

The U.S. intelligence community broadly agrees that Russia’s military intelligence unit has been providing financial support to the Taliban to help fund Taliban operations that have killed coalition troops in Afghanistan. But a central dispute — outlined in a memo written by recently confirmed Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe earlier this month — remains over the Russians’ motives.

While the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center have assessed with “medium confidence” that the GRU has paid bounties to Taliban fighters specifically to kill U.S. soldiers — and that the operation has resulted in fatalities — other agencies have expressed “low confidence” in that assessment, stemming from difficulties tying specific payments to certain attacks, according to people who have seen the memo.

Whereas the CIA has confidence in its human sources and interrogations conducted on the ground, the National Security Agency relies more on surveillance and signals intelligence to make assessments, and remains uncertain about whether certain payments constitute “bounties” or whether they are just part of the broader pattern of Russian funding for Taliban operations that ultimately kill coalition troops.

The intelligence community and the Pentagon are continuing to investigate whether specific Taliban attacks on U.S. soldiers resulted directly from GRU payments, current national security officials said. Still, lawmakers are choosing to emphasize that there are no disagreements about how Putin has used his intelligence agencies.

“Vladimir Putin runs real military and intelligence agencies and he puppet-masters a whole bunch more, and he tries to get them to be available to do horrible things to Americans and to our allies,” Sasse said.

In the meantime, Democrats appear to be giving Ratcliffe, the nation’s top intelligence official, a chance to prove himself as a nonpolitical figure, given his history as a strident defender of the president. Some congressional officials raised eyebrows about the timing of his memo — which concluded that the interagency assessments of the bounty intelligence were still mixed and incomplete — given White House attempts to frame the issue as too uncertain to warrant an immediate response. But people familiar with the document said it was straightforward and factual.

“I don’t think Ratcliffe has been in this job long enough to characterize whether he’s going to play it straight and do his job or whether he’s going to be in more of a political role,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), a member of the Intelligence Committee. “I think he has a lot to do to build confidence given his previous role on cable news networks.”

“I didn’t support Mr. Ratcliffe,” added Warner. “Now he’s in, I want him to be successful. And as long as he is transparent and forthcoming with this committee — and we have tried to treat everybody with respect — I want to work with him.”

Democrats emphasized that they still had confidence in the career civil servants who make up the vast majority of the U.S. intelligence community, but said they are concerned Ratcliffe would not tell the president what they believe he needs to hear.

“I’ve made it clear that I think the executive branch has an obligation to be straight with the American people, and the list could go on, but he’s the guy that’s going to be held accountable,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), an Intelligence Committee member, said in a brief interview. “In the last 48 hours, the administration isn’t even close to a passing grade.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised Ratcliffe and noted that he was being forced to answer for intelligence assessments that might have occurred long before he was sworn in as director of national intelligence on May 26. Some of the intelligence on the bounties was included in Trump’s written daily briefing, known as the Presidential Daily Brief, in February.

“The challenge with anything is things that happened before your tenure — you have to sort of go back and reconstruct some of the things that happened and answer questions about it. But he’s up to the task, he did great” said Rubio, who added that he talks with Ratcliffe daily.

Ratcliffe has already briefed members of the Intelligence panel and a smaller group of congressional leaders, known as the Gang of Eight, on the intelligence assessments related to the alleged Russian bounties. Trump administration officials have also briefed smaller groups of lawmakers, including a contingent of House Democrats as well as members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

But the latter briefing left senators, particularly Democrats, dissatisfied with the amount of information they were getting. It was a regularly scheduled briefing on Afghanistan, but lawmakers predominantly asked about the bounty allegations — in particular, whether and when the president was actually briefed on the intelligence assessment.

“That was not a briefing,” a frustrated Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said in a brief interview last week after walking out of the Senate’s secure facility.

“There was no one there who had any information about what information was given to the president or when it was given to him,” Warren added. “[They] were evidently aware of nothing about briefings to the president, which is why we came.”

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) agreed, calling the briefing “unsatisfactory” on the question of who briefed Trump and when, and suggested sanctions as one possible response to the Russian escalation. And she said that of the five bounty-related intelligence documents she had read in a secure Capitol facility, none backed up the White House claims that the assessments were too uncorroborated to disclose to the president.

“The documents I read are consistent with what’s been reported so far,” she told reporters. “As far as I can tell, what’s out there is accurate.”

Senate Republicans could lose nearly half of the women currently in their caucus come November after recently making painstaking gains — the latest potential blow to the party in the Trump era.

Out of nine Senate GOP women serving, four face highly competitive races this year in Arizona, Maine, Georgia and Iowa. It's a dynamic that exists in part because Republicans have had some success in chipping away at the gender gap in Congress: the Senate GOP currently has an all-time high of women after nearly doubling the number of women in its conference since 2016. House Republicans have also enhanced their recruitment efforts after seeing their ranks shrink in 2018.

“It’s always been ... a traditional weak spot for us,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who is also up in 2020, but in a relatively safe race. “Our numbers are not obviously as large as the Democrat Caucus, but we’re gaining on them.”

But Republicans face a challenging electoral environment up and down the ballot, particularly as suburban female voters have turned away from the party in droves out of antipathy for President Donald Trump. Losing those races would be a setback for the party’s efforts to broaden its representation — and to keep the Senate majority. Along with other battlegrounds in North Carolina, Colorado and Montana, they could decide which party controls the Senate.

“I always say that we need to do a better and an aggressive job in recruitment of women, Republican women for the Senate, the House, for our local candidates,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). “And so that’s just our reality.”

Top Senate Republicans have worked hard in recent years to improve representation among women in the chamber. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has not only recruited candidates to run but occasionally pushed governors for their appointments when vacancies arose.

Republicans citing progress highlight the recent appointments of three who are up in 2020: Sens. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, Martha McSally of Arizona and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi. They also note that former Rep. Cynthia Lummis is on track to replace retiring Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.). Even some Democrats privately acknowledge the effort Republicans have made recently.

But the push could stall this year as Trump’s poor polling threatens to pull the GOP’s Senate majority down with him. Both Republicans and Democrats note that the women GOP senators in competitive races are not endangered because of their gender, but because of the states they represent and the broader electoral environment facing the party.

“It’s a tough alignment of the stars, because we’ve seen such progress with Republican women in the Senate and it just so happens that it’s a really tough year,” said Janet Mullins Grissom, a veteran Republican strategist and former McConnell chief of staff and campaign manager.

“Fortunately, the female Republican candidates are strong candidates,” Grissom added. “I think we can be optimistic and hopeful that they'll battle back in what’s been a tough year.”

The four GOP women with difficult races include veteran centrists like Sen. Susan Collins, who is expected to take on Maine state House speaker Sara Gideon, as well as conservative freshman Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa who faces businesswoman Theresa Greenfield. Meanwhile, McSally is in a tough race against Mark Kelly, a former astronaut married to former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.), and Loeffler faces an intraparty challenge from GOP Rep. Doug Collins and a fight against Democrat Raphael Warnock.

In an interview, McSally rejected that Trump was a drag on the votes of suburban women.

“I’m a suburban, college-educated woman, so this is my demographic,” McSally said. “I’ve given my life to serve others, to break barriers for others … to stand up against discriminating policies like my eight-year battle in the Pentagon over the burka so this is my constituency, man.”

Meanwhile, Loeffler, who was appointed to her seat in December, credits Trump with inspiring her own desire to serve in the Senate.

“The party’s been very supportive, Leader McConnell has been incredibly supportive, everyone, I think that we’re doing a great job,” Loeffler said in a recent interview. “In fact, under President Trump, more Republican women are running for office at any time in history.”

Several of the Republicans have broken barriers. Ernst, who serves in party leadership, was the first woman to represent Iowa in Congress and the first female combat veteran in the Senate; McSally was the first female fighter pilot to serve in combat; and if she wins this year, Loeffler would be the first woman elected to the Senate from Georgia.

But they all face difficult campaigns.

Kelly has significantly outraised McSally since he launched his campaign, and nearly every poll shows McSally losing in a state where Trump is also struggling. Collins faces the toughest and most expensive race of her career, amid a barrage of attacks from the left for her vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. A recent internal GOP poll conducted in late June, however, found Collins ahead by 8 percentage points.

Ernst’s race is a toss-up and a recent poll from the Des Moines Register had Greenfield leading as Trump’s poll numbers slip in a state he carried four years ago. And Loeffler has trailed Collins in the polls amid scrutiny over her stock trades during the pandemic, though the FBI and Ethics Committee have since dropped probes on the issue.

Democrats argue that the GOP has a major problem with women voters, fueled mostly by Trump’s divisive presidency, and one that will hurt Senate candidates across the map. National surveys and battleground polls consistently show a major advantage for Joe Biden over Trump with women. Biden had a 22-percentage point lead among women in a recent New York Times national survey, and an even larger lead among college-educated women. Democrats expect similar gender gaps to emerge in Senate contests, some of which are being fought in presidential battlegrounds.

“If you vote with an unpopular president like Donald Trump — who's doing damage to your state — 96, 97, 98 percent of the time, voters are going to hold you accountable,” said Martha McKenna, a veteran Democratic strategist who ran the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s independent expenditure program in 2018. “Trump's ugliness and destruction, and their complicity in that, is an impossible hurdle for them. Women voters are done and that's true for all of them.”

Democrats have 17 women in their caucus — more than one-third of their party’s senators — and they’ve played key roles in the party’s electoral success in recent cycles. Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Jacky Rosen of Nevada were the only two Democrats to flip GOP-held seats in 2018. This year, the DSCC has endorsed women in Iowa, Maine, Kansas, Kentucky and Texas, all of which could be competitive.

McConnell, meanwhile, has publicly discussed his goal of electing more women to the conference. He made adding GOP women to the Judiciary Committee a priority after the contentious 2018 Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, in which the judge faced sexual assault allegations. Still, most Republicans argue that what matters most is the quality of candidates, not whether they’re men or women.

“I think it’s important to recruit candidates, good people to serve no matter their gender,” said Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.). A campaign spokesperson for Collins emphasized that the Maine Republican has “never thought of herself as a ‘woman’ senator, she is a senator” and “has never solely focused on what some might say are ‘women’s issues,’ instead, she has focused on issues that are important to all Americans.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who won her seat in 2018 and joined the Judiciary Committee along with Ernst, said she’d still like to see more recruitment of conservative women and acknowledged that Trump’s numbers “have been up and down with women.” But she said that conservative women overall have an appealing message.

“Most women are center to right,” Blackburn argued. “The economy and safety and security are the top issues with women, and I think we’re good on those.”

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - Puerto Rico on Tuesday braced for potential political upheaval after the U.S. territory’s governor denied allegations of obstruction of justice while the main opposition party demanded she be investigated and hinted at a possible impeachment process.

In a brief statement issued late Monday, Gov. ...

Megachurches and other religious organizations with ties to vocal supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump were approved for millions of dollars in forgivable loans from a taxpayer-funded pandemic aid bailout, according to long-awaited government data released this week. Among those approved for loans through the massive government relief program were a Dallas megachurch whose pastor has been an outspoken ally of the president; a Florida church tied to Trump spiritual adviser and "prosperity gospel" leader Paula White; and a Christian-focused nonprofit where Jay Sekulow, the lawyer who defended the president during his impeachment, is chief counsel. Evangelical Christians played a key role in Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election and have remained a largely unwavering contingent of his base.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - Puerto Rico’s governor denied allegations of obstruction of justice late Monday as the main opposition party demanded she be investigated and hinted at a possible impeachment process in what could be the latest round of political upheaval for the U.S. territory.

In a brief ...