On Monday, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote ruled that two banks — Japan's Nomura Holdings and Britain's Royal Bank of Scotland — fraudulently sold faulty mortgages to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae leading up to the 2008 housing crash. "The magnitude of falsity, conservatively measured, is enormous," Cote wrote in what The New Times calls her "scathing 361-page decision."

Nomura and RBS were the only two of 18 large banks that didn't settle with the Federal Housing Finance Agency; the other 16 avoided airing their presumably dirty laundry in court by collectively paying almost $18 billion in penalties. In the jury-less trial, Coat heard evidence that two-thirds of the mortgages RBS and Nomura packaged into securities had underwriting defects. The FHFA is expected to ask for $500 million in compensation. Namura says it will appeal the ruling.

In tangentially related news, The Wall Street Journal reports that top executives from seven of the largest U.S. banks met on March 31 to discuss the "anti-Wall Street rhetoric already bubbling up on the 2016 campaign trail" and brainstorm ways to "push back against the prevailing narrative that banks are bad." There won't be "a new ad campaign or lobbying blitz, people familiar with the discussions" told The Journal, in part because "many bank officials are skeptical they can do much to counteract critics without triggering more damaging backlash." Peter Weber

Sen. Amy Klobuchar might prove to be the most important Democratic presidential candidate when all is said and done in Iowa next week — even if she doesn't win the state's caucus.

That's because many Iowa voters appear to be split among moderate candidates like Klobuchar, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former Vice President Joe Biden, which The New York Times reports is at least playing a role in the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). If those moderate voters want to prevent Sanders from getting a head start toward the nomination with an Iowa victory, per The Times, rallying around one of the other candidates seems like a good place to start.

Klobuchar is doing pretty well in Iowa, but she's lagging behind Buttigieg and Biden, so her supporters are seen as having the most potential to make a switch, especially because of the caucus' multiphase process. If Klobuchar struggles to pick up the votes she needs early on, those backing her could theoretically shift to a stronger candidate and help push someone like Biden to victory.

It sounds like some in the Biden camp are aware of this. Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who's thrown his weight behind the Biden campaign, thinks Biden can appeal to Klobuchar's crowd since both politicians frame themselves as pragmatists, and well, as he puts it, "Joe is going to need a running mate." Read more at The New York Times. Tim O'Donnell

This might be the most easily debunked claim of the whole impeachment trial.

President Trump's team of defenders got their turn on the Senate floor on Monday, with one of them, Trump lawyer Jane Raskin, employing a new strategy to distance Trump from his lawyer and Ukraine link Rudy Giuliani altogether. "In this trial, in this moment, Mr. Giuliani is just a minor player, that shiny object designed to distract you," Raskin said. "Senators, I urge you most respectfully, do not be distracted."

While Raskin may try to downplay Giuliani's involvement, the transcript of Trump's July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which Trump so often begs the world to read, would say otherwise. Giuliani's name comes up no less than six times in that call memo, with Trump mentioning "Giuliani" two times and "Rudy" twice as well.

There are also all those times impeachment witnesses told the House that Giuliani was deeply tied to Trump's Ukraine dealings, with a few of them explicitly saying how Trump had told them to "talk to Rudy" when they had concerns about the country. Oh, and don't forget all those other times Giuliani himself talked up his involvement with Ukraine while making gaffe after gaffe on national TV. Kathryn Krawczyk

Fox News' Chris Wallace is once again calling out pro-Trump spin on the network, even slamming one contributor on air in a tense exchange.

Wallace spoke Monday about the explosive New York Times report that former National Security Adviser John Bolton in his upcoming book writes that President Trump told him he wanted to continue withholding aid to Ukraine until officials helped with investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

To get a sense of how "big" this news is, one only has to look at Trump supporters "spinning like crazy that it isn't big news," said Wallace. This only reinforces that this is a "really important development in this case," he continued, per Mediaite.

Wallace went on to observe that it's now "much, much less likely" that Trump's impeachment trial will wrap up on Friday without any witnesses being called, as the Bolton news makes it "awfully hard" for Republican senators on the fence about calling witnesses to vote against doing so.

Not long after, Wallace got into an argument with contributor Katie Pavlich about the idea of calling Bolton to testify after she claimed that in "every impeachment beforehand, the witnesses that were called had been called in the House before being brought to the Senate."

"In the Clinton impeachment, they'd been called by the independent counsel," Wallace told her, adding, "Get your facts straight!" Brendan Morrow

The Senate would probably want to hear from a firsthand witness in President Trump's impeachment trial. But Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) isn't sure where you'd find one.

Despite a Sunday report indicating former National Security Adviser John Bolton will say in his book he spoke directly to President Trump about Ukraine, a number of GOP senators still don't want to hear from him in Trump's impeachment trial. Hawley is among those lawmakers, giving new reasoning to his anti-Bolton argument Monday by questioning whether Bolton even was a firsthand witness to Trump's alleged crimes.

Bolton's book reportedly describes how Trump talked to his former adviser about withholding security assistance from Ukraine until it agreed to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. And with Republicans largely complaining impeachment witnesses testified to the House based on "hearsay," one would think they'd like to hear from someone who was actually in, as Bolton's book title so aptly puts it, "the room where it happened." Kathryn Krawczyk

Details are still emerging about the circumstances surrounding the helicopter that killed Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, and seven others including the pilot, but the flight was reportedly granted special approval to fly in challenging weather conditions.

Fog was thick Sunday morning in the Los Angeles area when the helicopter took off and made its way toward Gianna Bryant's youth basketball tournament, but air traffic control at Burbank airport gave the pilot Special Visual Flight Rules clearance, allowing the aircraft to enter Burbank's airspace.

A Federal Aviation Administration official said air traffic control's approval would not have extended to Calabasas, where the helicopter crashed. By that point, the official said, it would have been up to the pilot to determine if conditions were appropriate to continue or transition to instrument flight rules.

Witnesses near the site of the crash described conditions as so foggy that people had trouble driving, per The New York Times. "I couldn't see anything, not even a silhouette," said Scott Daehlin who heard the sound of the helicopter flying low before making impact with a nearby hillside. "My first thought was what in the world is a helicopter doing out here in this fog?" Read more at The New York Times. Tim O'Donnell

Immigrants may now face visa and citizenship restrictions based on their past or hypothetical future use of public benefits.

In a 5-4 decision Monday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration's public charge rule to take effect nationwide. The rule would restrict immigrants who are considered or could later be considered a "public charge" from gaining legal status, and comes despite multiple prior courts striking down the rule.

The Monday decision came along ideological lines, with the court's four liberal justices dissenting from the majority opinion. U.S. District Judge George Daniels previously struck down the rule, mirroring critics who've called it a "wealth test" for immigrants by saying the rule is "repugnant to the American dream." Daniels had also placed an injunction on the rule's implementation due to a likely appeal to the Supreme Court, and the higher court lifted that injunction Monday.

The theory of a public charge rule has existed for decades, but wasn't codified until the Trump administration drew up this rule in 2017. The rule targets people attempting to legally immigrate into the U.S. by assessing if they have used public benefits such as food stamps in the past, or if they might use them after gaining legal status. If the government determines a person is or could become a "public charge," they can block a person from getting a visa, green card, citizenship, and other forms of legal status. Kathryn Krawczyk