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An FBI agent has been charged with attempted murder in the off-duty shooting of another man on a Metro subway train last year in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., according to court records unsealed Tuesday.

The charges stem from a Dec. 15 shooting on a train near Medical Center Station in Bethesda. Police for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority said in a Dec. 18 statement that the agent fired multiple shots after the man had approached him that morning and they exchanged words.

When the man asked Valdivia for money on the train, the agent said no and the man muttered expletives while walking away, Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Robert Hill said during Tuesday’s hearing. Valdivia told the man, "Watch your mouth," and the man turned around and approached Valdivia, who told him to back up multiple times. Valdivia shot the man from 2 to 3 feet away, Hill said, and did not identify himself as an agent until after the shooting. The man had part or all of his spleen, colon and pancreas removed during surgery after the shooting.

Of course, I knew how difficult and unlikely this was, but I never would’ve predicted just how far left Pelosi’s party would go in just 100 days, and how President Biden would become their biggest cheerleader for a massive expansion of government.  

Washington, D.C. has spent nearly $2 trillion taxpayers don’t have on a "COVID relief" package, where less than 10 percent had anything to do with COVID relief. They’ve unveiled a $2.3 trillion "infrastructure" package, 93 percent of which is spent on anything and everything but our roads and bridges.  

hen, at the joint address to Congress on Wednesday, President Biden revealed yet another $1.8 trillion spending package that inserts Washington bureaucrats into family decisions, and disincentivizes work, opportunity and prosperity, and asks for the largest tax hike in American history during the middle of a pandemic.  

“The damage is profound,” he told the Financial Times in an interview. “The sacking of the Capitol is proof positive that what we thought was dangerous is indeed very much so. Those outlets that propagate lies to their audience have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years.

“I hope that those people who didn’t think it was that dangerous now understand, and that they stop.”

Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott, the new chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, defended President Donald Trump on Wednesday when asked if his ally bore any responsibility for inciting a riot at the US Capitol, putting the onus of last week's death and destruction instead on the mob.

"He's not the one who made the decision to breach this Capitol," Scott said.

Scott's comments came as the pro-Trump riot has torn apart the Republican Party, setting off a backlash among some donors, a historic second impeachment of the President and a fight over how best to build a path back to power.

A senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee introduced a bill Thursday seeking to reclaim $3.6 billion in emergency funds the Trump administration reallocated to fund a U.S.-Mexico border wall.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper last month signed off on $3.6 billion in Defense Department construction funds for 175 miles of wall on the border.

In August, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the government to use about $2.5 billion in Defense Department funds after that money had been frozen by lower courts while a lawsuit was proceeding. Trump had directed $155 million to be diverted to border facilities from FEMA disaster relief.

The House Republicans’ underlying argument is too jumbled and confusing even to be agreed with. It can only be absorbed. It is to be repeated, not to be analyzed. It is not even really an argument at all. It is a hypnotic litany, a creed of faith—a faith all the more compelling for defying sense and experience.

At Fox News, on talk radio, and on the web, American conservatives have built a communications system that effectively consolidates in-group identity. Much of the time, the talkers and listeners do not themselves understand what they are saying. They use key words and phrases as gang signs: badges of identity that are recognized without necessarily being understood.

This system of communication tightly bonds in-group members. That bond, in turn, exerts tremendous power over American politics.

when I ask Schiff what keeps him awake at night, the answer isn’t impeachment at all—it’s something much broader.

“You know, I have a lot of optimism about the country,” he said. “We’re going to get through this. We’ve been through worse. Vietnam was much more divisive and deadly than the current circumstances. So we’ve been through worse, even recently. What I worry about in the long term is, the way we get our information now divides the country and makes it difficult to communicate with each other. In social media, fear and lies and anger travel so much faster than truth. And we haven’t figured out how to deal with it. I don’t think anybody has.

“And it is dividing us, it is polarizing us, it’s a dangerous development for the country,” Schiff continued. “I think the revolution in how we get our information is every bit as significant as the invention of the printing press. But we had hundreds of years to get used to that innovation, and we’ve had practically no time to get used to this one. So there isn’t an easy answer to that. And we’re not going to tell Fox News what they can say, no matter how bitterly divisive it is, and we’re not going to tell the social-media companies how to construct their algorithms.”

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham accused Democrats of waiting to send articles of impeachment to the Senate in order to help certain Democratic candidates for president, according to an interview she did with Fox Business.

Record numbers of Americans felt strongly favorable or unfavorable toward Trump during his time in office. (The strongly favorable and unfavorable was 71% in a Fox News poll last month, for instance.)

Trump's presidency drove historic turnout and record donations to political campaigns in a country whose voters have often shown a disinterest in politics.

The 2020 campaign, by comparison, had a little less than 160 million voters participate

All of this was to grossly underestimate Trump. He may have done plenty of the cheeseburgers and Fox News stuff. But he also kept his eye on the great strategic prize: the creation in the US of a vast and impassioned base for anti-democratic politics.

It is hard, after such a relentless barrage of outrage and weirdness over the last four years, to remember what the broad consensus about Trump was at the beginning of 2016.

Why? Because a timetable for action and a commitment to appoint, to the thousands of positions filled by the incoming president, people with expertise and experience, would constrain him. He was not going to be constrained.

Just days before the crucial Georgia runoffs that will determine control of the US Senate, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger delivered a strong message to Donald Trump as the President persists in attacking the Peach State's electoral process and the Republican leaders in charge of administering the system.

"Respectfully, President Trump: What you're saying is not true. The truth will come out,"

Trump said he spoke to Raffensperger on the phone in an attempt to convince Raffensperger to look into unfounded conspiracy theories about the vote in November. According to Trump, Raffensperger refused to do so.

“After all of the controversial things Donald Trump did over the past four years, why was this week the final straw? Why now say that you can no longer be part of his administration?” Wallace asked on “Fox News Sunday.”

But “Wednesday was different, Wednesday was existential,” he said. “It was wrong. And I think it was important for those of us who used to be on the inner circle ... who was not a never Trumper to come out and say that.”

He admitted that he was wrong to argue, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published six weeks ago, that Trump would concede gracefully. He said he really believed at the time that Trump would leave in a “presidential manner.”

Trump has repeatedly attacked Biden -- a self-described "gaffe machine" -- over his verbal stumbles, questioning whether they're evidence of cognitive decline.

President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaigns sparred Monday over the possibility of a winner being declared on Election Night, with Trump’s campaign accusing Democrats of wanting to “delegitimize” votes and Biden’s campaign saying there’s “no scenario” the race will be called for Trump on Tuesday evening.

“Biden’s political operatives have already been distributing talking points and research to delegitimize Election Day results by coaching surrogates to refer to the President’s Election Day success as a ‘Red Mirage,’” Clark said. “The operatives are advising surrogates and media to create a smoke screen by casting blame all around—imaging postal delays or falsely claiming that mail-in ballots that have simply not been returned should be considered legitimate votes that need to be counted.”

The Trump campaign added that they are “on guard for Democrat’s to attempt to subvert state declines for receiving and counting ballots and we will fight to make sure they adhere to the law.”

Kicking off his final day of campaigning ahead of Election Day in battleground Ohio, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden took aim at President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and stressed that it was time for the president “to pack his bags and go home.”

And taking aim at a president who for months resisted wearing a mask in public and who has continued to ridicule Biden’s mask wearing, the former vice president asked, “imagine where we’d be if this president from the beginning just wore a mask instead of mock wearing a mask.”

“I’m never going to wave the white flag of surrender. We’re going to beat this virus. We’re going to get it under control, I promise you” and spotlighted that “the first step to beating virus is beating Donald Trump.”

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked her first questions during oral arguments on Monday, in a remote hearing on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case. 

The first case Barrett and the rest of the justices heard Monday morning was U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services v. Sierra Club.

Barrett on Monday is also hearing arguments -- along with the rest of the court -- in another low-profile case, Salinas v. Railroad Retirement Board.

He’s such a whiner. You’d think a guy in the White House, with the Senate in his lap, two of his own Supreme Court Justices and Fox News would have things under control. But he plays the victim card like Blanche DuBois.