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President Donald Trump is not waiting to be acquitted of impeachable crimes to show that no one can stop him doing what he wants to do.

On a day that was an apt leitmotif for his administration, Trump was formally accused of abusing power and obstructing Congress when Democrats finally transmitted articles of impeachment to the Senate. Lev Parnas, an associate of Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, publicly implicated the President in the Ukraine scandal and, disputing previous administration claims that the effort was to root out corruption, told CNN's Anderson Cooper the aim was "all about 2020."Trump, however, is simply pressing on with the kind of unfettered conduct and violation of governing conventions that that got him in trouble in the first place, showing that for him, impeachment might be a stain, but it won't be a lesson.

Trump's defiance of attempts to examine and restrain his conduct and concept of almost endless presidential authority encompasses the power duels in Washington and his bombastic actions abroad.

Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on Tuesday called for an investigation into the "disturbing" notion that she was under surveillance from associates of the President's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

The texts released by the House Democrats Tuesday show Connecticut Republican congressional candidate Robert Hyde berating Yovanovitch and suggest he was monitoring her while she was in Kiev and relaying her movements to Parnas. Hyde declined to comment to CNN when asked if he had surveilled Yovanovitch, who served as a key witness in the House impeachment probe.

Another retired ambassador said they had "never heard of anything like it.""It's common that terrorists and former communists do this to us. It's appalling and incomprehensible that somebody who is working for the President's personal lawyer would have been doing this to our ambassador," they told CNN.That ambassador explained that surveillance is a "real problem" that's "unfortunately pretty common" for diplomats. Embassies have "surveillance detection teams" -- normally locally hired staff -- "who actually are out there looking to see if anyone is showing unwarranted interest" in embassy operations, they said.

House Democrats on Tuesday tried to toss some new meat into the Ukrainian stew that is the heart of the impeachment case against President Donald Trump. House Intelligence Committee investigators are scouring through a trove of documents supplied by Lev Parnas, an indicted associate of Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

It looks a bit sleazy for the President to be authorizing his former counsel to represent a potential impeachment witness who is under indictment by his own Justice Department, but it is unlikely to constitute criminal or impeachable conduct.

In the Trump impeachment, a hasty investigation and presentation of evidence to the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees was terminated before court rulings could have affirmed the legitimacy of congressional subpoena power.

House Democrats unveiled new evidence Tuesday that they plan to send to the Senate as part of their case to remove President Donald Trump from office over his efforts to pressure Ukraine into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election.

Text messages and handwritten notes from Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas. (Parnas, his business partner Igor Fruman and two others were charged with funneling foreign money into US elections and using a straw donor to obscure the true source of political donations. They have all pleaded not guilty to the charges.)

Parnas sought to set up a meeting between Giuliani and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and connect with members of his government. The records also add more details about the push by Giuliani to seek the ouster of the then-US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi is speaking to reporters and said the impeachment trial is needed because “every day new, incriminating information comes forward.”

Pelosi then spoke about a poster in her grade school classroom which said: “What a tangle web we weave when we first practice to deceive,” and said with this White House, you see that happen “more and more.”

This year America will face an epic choice. The future of the White House and supreme court, abortion rights, climate policy and a range of other issues – all are in play, at the same time that misinformation makes rigorous reporting more important than ever. Across the world, similar challenges lie ahead: far-right populism, escalating inequality, and a growing number of autocrats in power.

These days Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg can best be described as mortal enemies.

Bloomberg and Trump, both billionaires from New York, for years kept a cordial and even friendly relationship as they repeatedly ran into each other at charity events, parties and even one of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s weddings.

Trump has even praised Bloomberg’s past positions on gun control on Fox News’s Fox & Friends.

(CNN)New documents released Friday evening by House Democrats show communications between indicted Rudy Guiliani associate Lev Parnas and an aide to the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee in which they arrange interviews with Ukrainian officials and apparent meetings at the Trump hotel in Washington, DC, including with Giuliani.

The WhatsApp exchanges show that Nunes aide Derek Harvey raised questions about foreign assistance to Ukraine in late March 2019.

Parnas told Harvey in an April text message that he would be interviewing "the general prosecutor that got fired by Biden," who is Viktor Shokin. Parnas also referenced Ukraine's then-prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko. Both prosecutors also spoke to Giuliani in his effort to dig up dirt on the former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Trump fomented a deadly insurrection against the U.S. Congress to prevent a duly-elected president from taking office. Treason is not a word to be used lightly, but that is its textbook definition.

“We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about,” he told a sea of MAGA fans and Proud Boys on the Ellipse outside the White House at noon. From behind bulletproof glass, he told them: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Earlier, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani had proposed, to the same crowd, a “trial by combat” to resolve Trump’s election complaints. And Donald Trump Jr. delivered a political threat to lawmakers who don’t vote to reject the election results: “We’re coming for you.”

The former New York mayor’s dirt-digging effort on Hunter Biden in 2019 ended with President Trump’s impeachment. Now he is back with new associates. So far it is not going exactly as planned.282

On the weekend of Oct. 10, President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former adviser Stephen K. Bannon and a prominent new ally, a Chinese billionaire and Mar-a-Lago member named Guo Wengui, gathered at Mr. Guo’s luxury apartment overlooking Central Park for dinner and cigars.

Now Mr. Giuliani, undaunted and surrounded by a new cast of characters after some of his wingmen in the Ukraine caper were indicted, is trying again.

This year, hundreds of thousands of Latinos in Texas will vote for the first time, and more Texans have cast votes early than the total number who voted in 2016, giving Democrats hope that the dream is within grasp — even if they don’t win this year.

Republican leaders in Texas have long understood the importance of recruiting Hispanic voters and have tailored their messages to appeal to them.

Later, Gov. George W. Bush and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas deployed their Mexican-American family members to appeal to Hispanics. Mr. Bush’s nephew George P. Bush, the current commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, said at a campaign rally that his uncle could be counted on to “change the Republican Party so that it starts to represent our views, and our faces, and our diversity.” Mr. Abbott took a similar approach. His Mexican-American wife, Cecilia, and her mother, Maria de la Luz Segura de Phalen, were featured prominently in campaign commercials.

“What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” Mr. Carlson said on Thursday night, his voice ringing with incredulity in a 10-minute monologue at the top of his show. “Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of government.” But, he said, when he invited Ms. Powell on his show to share her evidence, she became “angry and told us to stop contacting her.”

The response was immediate, and hostile. The president’s allies in conservative media and their legions of devoted Trump fans quickly closed ranks behind Ms. Powell and her case on behalf of the president, accusing the Fox host of betrayal.

“How quickly we turn on our own,” said Bo Snerdley, Mr. Limbaugh’s producer, in a Twitter post that was indicative of the backlash against Mr. Carlson. “Where is the ‘evidence’ the election was fair?”

he inflicted on us a presidency which was ignorant, cruel, reckless, lawless, divisive, and disloyal.

Mendacity and bigotry became the mode of communication between America’s president and his party’s base.

Not only did he worsen a deadly pandemic—by immersing an angry and alienated minority in his alternate reality, he is sickening our future.

President Trump is signaling that he may try to become only the second president in American history to win another term after being defeated.

Mr. Trump has been laying plans to run again in 2024 with a kickoff as early as this month or possibly on his successor’s Inauguration Day.

“It’s been an amazing four years,” he told guests in remarks posted online by a member of the Republican National Committee. “We’re trying to do another four years. Otherwise, I’ll see you in four years.”

The federal government's chief information security officer, Camilo Sandoval, says he has taken leave from his day job to help the private voter fraud investigation group, "Voter Integrity Fund."

But local, state and federal officials across the country have stated there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. And while the founder of Voter Integrity Fund, Matt Braynard, told CNN the group has found some evidence of voters illegally voting across state lines, they haven't made any evidence public.

lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and others have been thrown out of court.

President Donald Trump’s hopes of reversing the outcome of the 2020 election in the courts are running into the reality that the numbers just aren’t there in terms of votes he can dispute -- at least not yet.

At a Saturday press conference held just as the major networks were calling the election for Biden, Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani hinted that hundreds of thousands of votes might be overturned by a federal civil rights lawsuit he planned to file in Pennsylvania alleging that Republican observers were excluded from areas where mail-in ballots were tabulated or kept too far away to watch in a meaningful way.

“A court would not set aside the results of an election, or particular votes, based on violations of laws concerning observation of the counting process,” said Michael Morley, an assistant law professor at Florida State University who’s worked on election emergencies and post-election litigation. “Courts will not disturb election results based on unproven generalized claims about the theoretical possibility of fraud.”

Four Seasons Total Landscaping wants to "Make America Rake Again."

It's still not entirely clear how the Trump campaign ended up holding a press conference in Northeast Philadelphia near a sex shop, a crematorium and a jail. The hoopla was kicked off Saturday morning with a Trump tweet about an event at the Philadelphia Four Seasons.

At the press event, Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed without evidence that Joe Biden's victory in Pennsylvania was due to voter fraud. Four Seasons Total Landscaping declined requests for comment.

Although all 50 states have certified their election results and the Supreme Court swiftly rejected an emergency request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block election results in the commonwealth, the justices are now grappling with a new controversial bid from Texas, supported by President Donald Trump and 17 other Republican-led states.

They are asking the Supreme Court for an emergency order to invalidate the ballots of millions of voters in four battleground states -- Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania -- even though there is no evidence of widespread fraud.

They're asking for the court to block the electors from Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, pushing Biden back under the magic 270-vote total to win.

An Atlanta-area district attorney investigating Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results has subpoenaed half a dozen officials from the Georgia secretary of state's office, according to copies of the documents obtained by CNN. The flurry of activity comes as a special grand jury is set to begin its work of investigating the former President and his allies on June 1. A person familiar with the investigation said secretary of state officials are not alone in receiving subpoenas in recent weeks, as the Fulton County district attorney's office has ramped up its investigative activity.

The subpoenas call for the witnesses to testify on dates from early to mid-June. Raffensperger, who has previously said he would comply with a subpoena, appears slated to be one of the first witnesses to testify on June 2. His call with Trump -- in which the former President pressured Raffensperger to "find" the votes needed for Trump to win Georgia -- lies at the heart of the Georgia probe.

Willis, meantime, has said she's not limiting her investigation to Trump's infamous call with Raffensperger. She has cast a wide net -- looking at Georgia's fake electors, former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani's conspiracy-ridden presentation to state lawmakers and other issues -- as she tries to determine whether Trump and his allies engaged in a broad criminal conspiracy to try to swing the Peach State to Trump's column.

The 59-year-old, well known from countless media appearances and for running focus groups that provide an insight into America’s political psyche, has also now chosen a less partisan path.

Having once worked for rightwing Republicans such as Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, he no longer hesitates to condemn Donald Trump’s pernicious influence or fears the conservative media backlash.

You all have proven that there’s still a desire for substance in politics, not just slogans and soundbites, and thank God you haven’t completely embraced American politics because your elections are of substance rather than style.

the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.

t the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.

Already we can see the changes in individual character. In December, I wrote about the moral devolution of Rudy Giuliani and of the other MAGA men and women who have populated the highest echelons of the Trump movement