During his closed-door testimony to House impeachment investigators last week, David Holmes, a counselor in the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, said hearing U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland call President Trump from the middle of a Kyiv restaurant was "an extremely distinctive experience in my foreign service career."
The House released the Holmes transcript Monday night, and he is expected to attend a public impeachment hearing on Thursday. Acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor first discussed the overheard Trump-Sondland call during his public testimony last week.
The call took place July 26, one day after Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and requested he launch investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, as well as a baseless conspiracy theory about Ukraine meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Holmes said Sondland placed the call to Trump through a switchboard, and he overheard Trump ask if the Ukrainians were going to "do the investigation." Sondland responded, "He's gonna do it."
Holmes testified that he was shocked by Sondland's brazenness. "I've never seen anything like this, someone calling the president from a mobile phone at a restaurant, and then having a conversation of this level of candor, colorful language," he said. "There's just so much about the call that was so remarkable that I remember it vividly." Holmes said most of the local mobile networks are "owned by Russian companies, or have significant stakes in those. We generally assume that mobile communications in Ukraine are being monitored."
Click here to read the entire transcript. Catherine Garcia
The fourth annual Women's March is scheduled to take place on Saturday, and activists are expecting thousands of demonstrators to turn out for the events, which will be held in cities around the country.
The first Women's March took place the day after President Trump's inauguration, and drew hundreds of thousands of participants, reports NPR. This year, the march is expected to be smaller and without the celebrity appearances of years past, in part due to criticism the march's organizers have faced in recent years regarding inclusion and diversity.
The demonstration in Washington, D.C., is expected to attract up to 10,000 demonstrators. Read more at NPR. Summer Meza
Microsoft announced plans to become "carbon negative" by 2030, seeking to erase its entire carbon footprint since the company's founding in 1975 and begin removing more carbon from the environment than it emits.
The company first wants to reduce emissions to zero across its entire supply chain by 2030, and then focus on eliminating all of the carbon dioxide it has ever released by 2050, reports The Verge.
Microsoft has been carbon neutral since 2012, and achieves this through purchasing renewable energy and carbon offsets. Going negative will require more technology and investment than going neutral. "Technology does exist that does this, but getting the price and the scalability to where we need it to be is a significant challenge," said Lucas Joppa, the company's chief sustainability officer, per CBS News. The company plans to spend $1 billion over the next four years on carbon reduction, capture, and removal.
Read more at The Verge and CBS News. Summer Meza
Lev Parnas, the indicted associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani who worked as his envoy in Ukraine, communicated with a top aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) about an effort to find damaging information on former Vice President Joe Biden, documents released Friday night by House Democrats revealed.
The evidence shows Derek Harvey, a former White House official and top aide to Nunes, communicated extensively with Parnas and sought to speak with Ukrainian prosecutors who were giving Giuliani information about Biden, reports The Washington Post. The documents corroborate Parnas' own claims about Nunes's office's involvement in the scheme.
Parnas has said President Trump and his associates were working to push Ukraine into announcing an investigation into Biden. The messages, the Post writes, "indicate Nunes's office was aware of the operation at the heart of impeachment proceedings against the president — and sought to use the information Parnas was gathering." Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, did not comment on the documents.
Read more at The Washington Post and NBC News. Summer Meza
Former GOP Rep. Chris Collins was sentenced on Friday to two years in federal prison on charges of insider trading and lying to the FBI, reports NBC News.
Collins, who was a New York representative since 2013 and was the first member of Congress to endorse President Trump's candidacy, pleaded guilty to tipping off his son to confidential information regarding an Australian biotechnology company, which allowed them to make illegal stock trades avoiding more than $700,000 in losses.
At his sentencing, Collins tearfully apologized, reports The Washington Post. "I stand here today a disgraced former congressman," he said. "I cannot face my constituents. What I have done has marked me for life." The 26-month sentence will begin on March 17, and will likely be served at a federal prison camp in Pensacola, Florida.
Read more at NBC News and The Washington Post. Summer Meza
There's a brand new way Democrats can make the debate stage next month.
The Democratic National Committee announced requirements to qualify for February's primary debate Friday, saying the donor threshold will remain steady, with candidates needing at least 225,000 unique donors. Candidates will also, as before, need to hit at least five percent in four qualifying national polls or seven percent in two polls of New Hampshire, Nevada, or South Carolina voters. But there's now a third path that candidates can take to replace the poll requirement: If they win just one delegate in Iowa, they're in.
This could open a path for candidates such as entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who hit the donor requirement but didn't have enough qualifying polls to make January's debate. The Iowa caucuses are Feb. 3, and the next debate is Feb. 7 in New Hampshire. Kathryn Krawczyk
After traveling the world hunting for treasure in his personal life, Nicolas Cage can soon resume doing so in the movies, too.
A third National Treasure film is in the works at Disney with Bad Boys for Life's Chris Bremner writing a screenplay, The Hollywood Reporter wrote Friday.
No further details were provided in the report, which only briefly mentioned National Treasure while focusing on the status of a fourth Bad Boys film, which is also apparently happening. But this news comes more than a decade after National Treasure: Book of Secrets hit theaters, easily outgrossing the original but for some reason not being followed by five to eight more installments centered around Benjamin Franklin Gates' increasingly wacky adventures.
A third National Treasure has been discussed going back years, though, to the point that this movie could just be about the mythical quest for its own screenplay. Director Jon Turteltaub in 2018 suggested the odds it would come together weren't great, telling /Film, "I don't think Disney wants to make it," though he suggested it could happen as a streaming-exclusive film.
Now that it's apparently moving forward, though, what treasure hunt might be at the center of this installment? Could it just completely ignore the first two films and turn into a documentary about Nicolas Cage the actor's totally real attempt to locate the Holy Grail, which he revealed last year and dubbed his "grail quest"? Probably not, but Disney can have that idea for free. Brendan Morrow