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A scathing report by the US Capitol Police watchdog obtained by CNN reveals that there were even more law enforcement failures prior to January 6 than previously known, including new details about expired ammunition, ineffective shields and a previously unreported warning more than two weeks ahead of the insurrection about a map of the Capitol's underground tunnels that was posted on a pro-Donald Trump website.

Further, the report points out Capitol Police leadership knew as far back as July 2020 the department needed to make significant changes, but inexplicably failed to do so.

On that day, "the Department of Homeland Security notified the Department of a blog referencing tunnels on U.S. Capitol grounds used by Members of Congress and research of the website identified four 'threads/blog topics containing comments of concern,'" the summary states.

President Donald Trump has been impeached again -- the first leader in US history to be impeached twice by the House.

Impeachment in a two-part process. The House introduces and passes the articles of impeachment, but the Senate is where the person being impeached faces a trial -- and potential punishment.

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present. (Article 1, Section 3)

when President-elect Joe Biden takes office next week, it's unclear whether he'll have any Cabinet members in place.

Biden rolled out his picks for top officials quickly. But between Trump's protracted political fight over election results and the future control of the Senate up in the air until the Jan. 5 Georgia runoffs, the Republican-controlled Senate was slow to schedule hearings for them.

Biden plans to appoint acting agency heads when he takes office next week,

Shortly after rampaging Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a fan of the president posted a message on the pro-Donald Trump website TheDonald.win. Inspired by the mob’s attempt to stop lawmakers from confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral win, user CONN_WYNN said in an all-caps message, replete with an expletive, that it was “TIME TO LEAVE THE KEYBOARD” and “FIGHT FOR MY...COUNTRY.”

Before the Capitol attack, such a post may not have elicited a follow-up visit. But in the aftermath of the riot, which left five people dead, federal law enforcement agencies have intensified their scrutiny of extremist chatter online, activity that officials warn could be early warning signals of planned attacks around Biden’s inauguration in Washington on Jan. 20.“You don’t want to be the ones to have FBI agents knocking on your door at 6 a.m.,” Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday during a televised briefing with Vice President Mike Pence. “Anybody who plots or attempts violence in the coming week should count on a visit.”

Extremists seeking a politically motivated civil war and those seeking a race war “may exploit the aftermath of the Capitol breach by conducting attacks to destabilize and force a climactic conflict in the United States,” officials wrote in a joint bulletin issued on Wednesday by the National Counterterrorism Center and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and seen by Reuters

WASHINGTON — President Biden plans to sign three executive orders on Tuesday aimed at further rolling back his predecessor’s assault on immigration and at reuniting migrant children who were separated from their families at the Mexican border, according to administration officials.

In one order, the president will direct the secretary of homeland security to lead a task force to try to unite several hundred families that remain separated under former President Donald J. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which sought to discourage migration across the country’s southern border.

With two other orders, Mr. Biden will authorize a review of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies that limited asylum, stopped funding to foreign countries, made it more difficult to get green cards or be naturalized, and slowed down legal immigration into the United States.

he civil war raging inside the GOP may look like a problem for the Republican Party, but it is much more. It is a flashing red light for the entire country, warning America that if it continues on this path, it will become a country without guardrails against extremist ideologies.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, and there's no prohibition against believing crazy ideas.

It's no wonder the venerable former Republican Sen. John Danforth said the GOP has become a "grotesque caricature" of what it used to be.

The Trump administration has begun a pilot program in El Paso, Texas, aimed at speeding up the time it takes to adjudicate asylum cases, according to two Department of Homeland Security officials.

Currently, asylum officers conduct an interview wherein officers will decide whether an individual has a "credible fear of persecution" that could make them eligible for asylum in the United States. If an individual is found to have a credible claim, the individual is put into immigration proceedings, where a judge will eventually make the final determination.

The pilot program in El Paso accelerates that process.

The Trump Administration revealed Thursday that an additional 1,556 children have been separated from their parents than previously reported, bringing the total number of family separations since July 2017 up to nearly 5,500. The new instances of family separation came to light after a judge ordered the Administration to deliver an accounting of every case.

The ACLU’s class-action lawsuit has now expanded to include the 1,556 families along with the original 2,800 who were separated during former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Zero-Tolerance Policy.

The newly-disclosed cases deal with the period of July 1, 2017 through June 26, 2018, according to the ACLU — meaning many families were separated months before Sessions’ Zero-Tolerance Policy began on April 6, 2018. “There was a lot of public outcry over children who were separated during the Zero-Tolerance Policy, but this group of kids never really got that kind of public attention,” says Christie Turner, Deputy Director for Special Programs at Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), which is assisting in locating the families and providing them with legal services.

“As white people, taking away privilege can feel like an attack, when it’s just a leveling of the playing field. And I think that’s where a lot of people are right now: they’re feeling attacked, and this is a way they can lash out,” Christensen said. “It almost seems like people are looking for a reason to pull a Bundy and attack the government.”

White supremacist and anti-government groups are gravitating towards the standoff over gun rights in Virginia because they see it as a opportunity for radicalization and recruitment, said Daryl Johnson, a former lead analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The story they’re telling is that the Jews and immigrants are responsible for turning Virginia blue, and they’re coming to take your guns,” Friedfeld said. (Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire philanthropist and presidential candidate, is Jewish, and the gun violence prevention advocacy group he founded touted an investment of $2.5m in Virginia’s 2019 elections to back local lawmakers who support gun control.)

n June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.

Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified.

Excluding the District of Columbia force, each National Guard group is under the control of its respective state or territorial governor. The D.C. National Guard operates under federal control at all times.

Last year, in June, roughly 3,300 National Guard troops from 10 states deployed to Washington, D.C., during racial-justice protests. The National Guard dates back to before the declaration of U.S. independence, and its troops have deployed to locations as far flung as Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Mexican border.

The National Guard was conceived at first as a citizen force to protect families and towns from hostile attacks, and its mission has since grown to encompass domestic emergencies, overseas combat missions, counternarcotics operations, and other duties.

The Kremlin uses RT to spread English-language propaganda to American audiences, and was part of Russia's election meddling in 2016, according to a 2017 report from the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Twitter labeled a video from the Russian-state controlled broadcaster RT as election misinformation on Thursday. YouTube videos posted by RT carry the disclaimer: "RT is funded in whole or in part by the Russian government."

Earlier this year, an internal intelligence bulletin issued by the Department of Homeland Security said Russia was amplifying disinformation about mail-in voting as part of a broader effort "to undermine public trust in the electoral process."

Law enforcement authorities are increasingly worried, not just about what they have already seen, but also about what has been threatened, especially online.

Vehicles with Trump flags halted traffic on Sunday on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey and jammed the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge between Tarrytown and Nyack, N.Y. Another pro-Trump convoy in Virginia ended in a tense shouting match with protesters as it approached a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond.

In Graham, N.C., a get-out-the vote rally on Saturday ended with police using pepper spray on some participants, including young children, and making numerous arrests. Organizers of the rally called it flagrant voter suppression.

Neera Tanden's imperiled nomination to be President Joe Biden's budget director faces a major test Wednesday to see if she has enough support to win Senate confirmation amid bipartisan opposition.

Two Senate committees are expected to vote on whether to advance her nomination to the floor as Tanden faces resistance from Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, a centrist from West Virginia, and a wide array of Republicans, who have said they will not back her because of her past partisan criticisms

If Tanden's nomination stalls out, it would be the first defeat of a high-profile Biden pick subject to Senate approval

In the House, GOP negotiators continued their seventh straight day of negotiations with the Clinton administration over a planned $50 billion emergency fund for the affected cities. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) continued to insist to Vice President Tim Kaine that any aid package had to be revenue-neutral, arguing that Medicaid benefits would need to be trimmed to compensate small businesses in the affected areas.

At the same time, Republicans also criticized the Clinton administration for not taking a more hawkish approach toward China, where the coronavirus outbreak originated. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, blasted Clinton’s refusal to sanction China over a lack of transparency.

Trump also mocked a public service announcement by former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush advocating that those in the affected quarantine zones wear masks when they go outside. “Look at Tweedledum and Tweedledee — what a joke! None of this would have happened in a Trump administration. Sad!”

Perhaps you remember the terrible ordeal suffered by the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen in 2018. She was awaiting her entree at the Virginia farm-to-table restaurant when the co-owner, appalled by Sanders’s defense of Donald Trump’s administration, asked her to leave. This happened three days after the homeland security secretary at the time, Kirstjen Nielsen, was yelled at for the administration’s family separation policy as she tried to dine at a Mexican restaurant in Washington.

More than one conservative writer warned liberals that the refusal to let Trump officials eat in peace could lead to Trump’s re-election.

Somehow, though, few are asking the same question of Republicans as Trump devotees terrorize election workers and state officials over the president’s relentless lies about voter fraud. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, described her family’s experience this past weekend: “As my 4-year-old son and I were finishing up decorating the house for Christmas on Saturday night, and he was about to sit down and to watch ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ dozens of armed individuals stood outside my home shouting obscenities and chanting into bullhorns in the dark of night.”

Attorney General William P. Barr acknowledged on Tuesday that the Justice Department has uncovered no voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” a striking repudiation of President Trump’s groundless claims that he was defrauded.

Mr. Barr has advanced Mr. Trump’s political agenda perhaps more than any other cabinet member, bringing the Justice Department as close to the White House as it has been since Watergate.

And Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, who has refused to recognize Mr. Trump’s election loss, moved closer to overtly accepting the reality that Mr. Biden would be in the White House next year as he discussed the prospects for more pandemic stimulus in 2021.

Rosenstein’s complicity in this machine was ugly, but it was by no means unique. Top officials at the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services all played a role. They were all sowing chaos, inflicting cruelty and causing unfathomable trauma at the behest of a small, vicious cadre up top

his argument was this: The jail time for these misdemeanors was usually a matter of days. So why were these parents not being reunited with their children afterward? “What became clear,” he told me, “is that they never had any intention of reuniting them until the parent gave up and was deported, if ever.”

The federal judge in San Diego agreed, saying the government’s behavior “shocks the conscience,” that the separation policy violated due process and that all separated families had to be reunited within 30 days.

President Donald Trump's order of a further withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq is the latest foreign policy move on a growing list in his final weeks in office that are meant to limit President-elect Joe Biden's options before he takes office in January.

cyber and irregular warfare, with a focus on China

It is contemplating new terrorist designations in Yemen that could complicate efforts to broker peace.

Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to say he would abide by the result, and his disinformation campaign about the integrity of the American electoral system,

since 1788 (a messy first experiment, which stretched just under a month), through civil wars, world wars and natural disasters now faces the gravest challenge in its history to the way it chooses a leader and peacefully transfers power.

“We have never heard a president deliberately cast doubt on an election’s integrity this way a month before it happened,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian and the author of “Presidents of War.” “This is the kind of thing we have preached to other countries that they should not do. It reeks of autocracy, not democracy.”