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a whistleblower complaint made by former DHS intelligence chief Brian Murphy, who has alleged that top DHS officials and a White House official sought to skew official intelligence reports.

DHS efforts to stall the committee’s investigation into Murphy’s allegations.

Murphy said he was pressured to stop providing assessments of the threat of Russian interference in the Nov. 3 U.S. election and to play down white supremacist activity. In addition, he said acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf told him in May to report instead on political interference threats posed by China and Iran and to highlight the involvement of left-wing groups in domestic disorder.

The House homeland security committee will mark up the bill next week, Chairman Mike McCaul announced Wednesday.

Republicans, including Trump, are demanding that any DACA deal include border security and possibly interior enforcement.

The measure may be controversial, though there is precedent.

Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser on Sunday sent a letter to President Donald Trump asking for an emergency declaration in order to get additional funding for President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration as safety concerns mount following the US Capitol breach.

"I have determined that the plans and resources previously assigned to the Inauguration are insufficient to establish a safe and secure environment as a direct result of the insurrectionist actions that occurred on January 6. Based on recent events and intelligence assessments, we must prepare for large groups of trained and armed extremists to come to Washington, DC."

"We are seeing ... chatter from these white supremacists, from these far-right extremists -- they feel emboldened in this moment," said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks and counters hate. "We fully expect that this violence could actually get worse before it gets better."

U.S. military battle against ISIS is "moving forward with a great sense of urgency,"

admitting that progress against the terrorists in Iraq and Syria remains slow-going.

"ISIL is dug in in, including in urban areas, and they hide behind civilians, and using men, women and children as human shields. So even as we are relentless, we have to be smart and target ISIL with precision."

Hibbing’s book, based on reporting, focus groups and surveys, is an attempt to understand what motivates the most enthusiastic Trump supporters.

The most ardent ones, he notes, are not economically marginalized, not submissive, not authoritarian, not religious or conventionally conservative. They have a strong concept that there is a core America, a concept which I suppose you could summarize as white, rural, John Wayne, football and hunting.

They feel that core America is under existential threat from people they view as outsiders: immigrants, Chinese communists, cosmopolitan urbanites and people of color. They see themselves as strong and vigilant protectors, defending the sacred homeland from alien menace.

As Republicans squabbled over Donald Trump’s controversial proposal to bar all Muslims from traveling to the United States, the House on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a bill imposing new restrictions on a visa waiver program that currently welcomes roughly 20 million people into the country each year.

The bill, which was approved on a 407 to 19 vote, would increase information sharing between the United States and the 38 countries whose passport-holders are allowed to visit the country without getting a visa, while also attempting to weed out travelers who have visited certain countries where they may have been radicalized.

The strong vote in the House could put momentum behind efforts to include changes to the program in the omnibus spending package – a must-pass bill that lawmakers are trying to finalize before government funding expires on Friday

In April 1998, President Bill Clinton read a Richard Preston novel, "The Cobra Event," about a biological attack on the U.S. using a lethal virus that spreads like the common cold.

the result was the first federal government effort to marshal resources in preparation for a pandemic, including the creation of the National Emergency Medical Stockpile, which stowed vaccines and medical gear in secret locations around the country. Bernard was appointed as the first official on the National Security Council whose sole job was to focus on health threats.

Instead, it kicked off a boom-and-bust cycle of pandemic preparedness that persisted into the Trump administration. By many accounts, Trump fell on the bust side of the equation when he fired his top biosecurity adviser, allowed the disbanding of his global health unit, and initially downplayed the coronavirus as it spread across the world.

White House aides improperly intervened to prevent a manuscript by President Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton from becoming public, a career official said in a letter filed in court on Wednesday, accusing them of making false assertions that he had revealed classified material and suggesting that they retaliated when she refused to go along.

The disclosures by the official who oversaw the book’s prepublication review, Ellen Knight, were the latest a series of accounts by current and former executive branch officials as the election nears accusing the president and his aides of putting his personal and political goals ahead of the public interest and an evenhanded application of the rule of law.

In an extraordinary 18-page document, a lawyer for Ms. Knight portrays the Trump administration as handling its response to the book in bad faith. Her account implied that the Justice Department may have told a court that the book contains classified information — and opened a criminal investigation into Mr. Bolton — based on false pretenses.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired top cybersecurity official Chris Krebs in a message on Twitter, accusing him without evidence of making a “highly inaccurate” statement affirming the Nov. 3 election was secure and rejecting claims of fraud.

Krebs’ work in protecting the election from hackers and combating disinformation about the vote won praise from lawmakers of both parties as well as state and election officials around the country.

Reuters reported last week that Krebs had told associates he expected to be fired.

President Donald Trump took credit on Thursday for what he said was a decades-low drop in border crossings from Mexico at a time when his administration has touted the need to militarize the border due to a surge in migration.

Trump was referring to a Department of Homeland Security report issued in December that found border crossings were at a 46-year low for fiscal year 2017. But the data doesn't cover the last several months, in which numbers have climbed to be more in line with those for the final years of the Obama administration. Another DHS report issued in September that looked at long-term trends found that border crossings have been trending downward since before Trump took office

Following Trump's comments on Thursday, Nielsen tweeted that despite the "historic lows in illegal traffic last year, the numbers are spiking.""March numbers up 37% from Feb (largest one month change in at least 8 years) and TRIPLE over March 2017. We must secure our border. As @POTUS has said: All options are on the table," she continued.

President Donald Trump will travel Tuesday afternoon to Yuma, Arizona, which he'll say demonstrates the benefits of a border wall — or, at least, border fencing. The visit could set the table for a legislative battle next month over whether to include border wall money in a spending bill that Congress must pass by Sept. 30 to keep the federal government funded

“What was once one of the least secure border areas in America is now one of the most secure areas because of those investments in border security,” said one Department of Homeland Security official speaking on background. The officials blurred the distinction between Trump’s campaign vision of a border wall — big, beautiful and concrete — and the sort of fencing and other technologies that DHS relies on currently.

Trump will visit a Marine base in Yuma, where he’ll get a tour of U.S. Customs and Border Protection equipment, including a Predator drone and a Border Patrol boat and surveillance truck. The president will then head into a closed-door briefing and later meet with Marines, according to an administration official. In the evening, Trump will hold a campaign-style rally in Phoenix, part of a broader effort to reinvigorate his base. The rally comes one week after Trump drew fire for blaming “both sides” for violence at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that attracted white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis, and where one counter-demonstrator was killed.

the Defense Department crossed a Rubicon that for the last six months Pentagon officials have tried to avoid: potentially pitting armed military forces against American citizens in the streets.

History has shown that such events never go well,

the most famous military confrontation with American citizens dates to 1932, when President Herbert Hoover ordered Army troops to clear more than 40,000 people

The answer to the question of how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been to partition “Palestine” into two states. This assumes, however, that the parties only have a dispute over land; but that has never been the case. The conflict has always had political, religious, historical, geographical and psychological dimensions. The international community’s unwillingness to accept this reality has led to the continued fantasy that a two-state solution is possible.

The Palestinians have never been prepared to share any part of the land they claim as their own.

Jews have no place in the Islamic world — except as second-class citizens (dhimmis) under Muslim rule

Under the plan, the bulk of the estimated 5 million people who could be protected from deportation would be parents of U.S. citizens or green card holders who have lived in the country for more than five years. According to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, as many as 3.7 million undocumented immigrants could fall into this category; beginning next spring, they could register with the government, undergo a background check, start paying taxes, and gain protected status for up to three years.

Another 290,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children would also be newly protected under an expansion of Obama's original Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The administration is eliminating the age cutoff for DACA, which had been open only to people under 31, and it is allowing immigrants to apply if they have lived in the U.S. since 2010, not 2007 as before. The changes will increase the number of people eligible for that program to about 1.5 million,

another 1 million immigrants would be newly protected from deportation under the other reforms in the president's directive.

The Trump administration resumed the U.S. refugee program Tuesday after a 120-day ban, but there will be severe new restrictions on admissions going forward. After the four-month review, the administration enhanced vetting for all refugee applicants and determined that an additional 90-day review was needed for 11 countries.

During the ban, the Departments of State and Homeland Security, in consultation with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), were tasked with determining whether additional security procedures identified during the review process were sufficient to ensure the security and welfare of the United States and whether the program should be reinstated. Those 11 nationalities were deemed to have a higher risk to the U.S. by the interagency review. Those countries are not being identified because of "law enforcement sensitivities," according to a senior DHS official.

At the end of January, one week into President Donald Trump's term, he signed an executive order banning all citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days, indefinitely banning all Syrian refugees and stopping all refugee admissions for 120 days.

Donald J. Trump is suddenly embracing an unlikely ally: The document-spilling group WikiLeaks,

increasingly seizing on a trove of embarrassing emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign

an extraordinary turnabout after years of bipartisan criticism of the organization

Ms Rice, who played a key role in the Obama administration’s response to the Ebola crisis, said her team had briefed incoming Trump officials about the risk of another pandemic during the transition. As part of that effort, her team held an exercise that explored what to do in the case of a global pandemic, she claimed. 

“We knew this was a serious and impending risk,” she told CNN. “That’s why under the Obama administration we set up an office for global health security and biodefence. We staffed it with a senior person and made sure they could report directly to the national security advisor and the homeland security advisor. Two years ago that office was dismantled.”

Even current Trump officials have said the office had served a useful purpose. 

New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago – cities across the US are closing down because of the Covid-19 epidemic. The economic impact is already dire. Millions are probably already out of work, and economists are certain we are heading for recession. Donald Trump has a solution: get back to work. But it is a solution that many think will make matters worse, leading to the loss of even more lives and a deeper economic crisis.

The administration is now reportedly considering easing some physical distancing directives in order to halt the collapse of the economy.Many experts think that’s a terrible idea.The result would be “an open door to chaos”, said Professor Michael Greenberger, a former counselor to the United States attorney general and now director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland.

Greenberger said he could understand the desire to support the economy but that such short-term thinking could be devastating.“There are no two ways about this. The shutdown of the economy is damaging. It is a balancing of risks. I think we will be in worse shape in the public health sector and the financial sector if we just unthinkingly send people back to business as usual.”

Last Thursday was not Donald Trump’s triumphant return to power after all.

This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.

Although March 4 came and went without a bloody coup attempt — that is, without another bloody coup attempt — damage was still done. Lawmakers abandoned their workplace out of fear of politically motivated violence. This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.