The Department of Justice has charged four members of the Chinese military in its investigation of the massive Equifax data breach.

The four members of the People's Liberation Army of China were charged Monday with hacking into the networks of credit reporting agency Equifax and stealing the personal information of about 145 million Americans. They were also charged with taking Equifax's trade secrets in what Attorney General William Barr called "a deliberate and sweeping intrusion into the private information of the American people."

Essentially half of America's population and many other people worldwide had their personal data breached in the Equifax hack, first exposed in 2017. That data included names and Social Security numbers, giving the breach a reputation as one of the largest of all time, both in terms of scale and what data was released. Equifax's CEO Richard Smith was forced into resignation after the incident, which also spurred congressional hearings and eventually a settlement of around $650 million.

The Justice Department similarly charged PLA members with hacking other American corporations back in 2014. With Monday's charge, "we remind the Chinese government that we have the capability to remove the Internet's cloak of anonymity and find the hackers that nation repeatedly deploys against us," Barr said in a press conference. Kathryn Krawczyk

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday addressed the FDA and the CDC's decision to recommend a pause of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine, arguing the move was not made "too quickly" and ultimately shows "how seriously we take safety."

Fauci, President Biden's chief medical adviser, at a White House press conference spoke about the health agencies' recommendation that use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine be paused while officials look into six blood clotting cases. He stressed that "this is a very rare event" given that 6.8 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have been administered in the United States, though he argued that officials weren't "pulling the trigger too quickly" with the pause.

"This is an unusual occurrence of a serious, adverse event that you want to make sure, before you go forward, you investigate it thoroughly, and that's exactly what they're doing," Fauci said. "They're pausing so that they can look at it more carefully."

The move to pause the Johnson & Johnson vaccine over such a rare occurrence prompted some criticism, though, as well as concerns that it could lead to greater vaccine hesitancy. But Fauci argued it should only make Americans more confident in the process.

"The fact that a pause was done I think just is a testimony to how seriously we take safety, and why we have an FDA and a CDC that looks at this very carefully and hopefully will resolve it pretty soon, within days to weeks," Fauci said. "...So I think it's a very strong argument for safety, actually."

Fauci also stressed that there have been "no red flag signals" from the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines even though they have already been administered to tens of millions of Americans, which shows that "you're dealing with a really safe vaccine." Brendan Morrow

Former President Donald Trump released a statement Tuesday criticizing the Food and Drug Administration's recommendation to pause the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, baselessly suggesting the decision was politically motivated.

"The results of this vaccine have been extraordinary, but now it's [sic] reputation will be permanently challenged," Trump said. He then floated, without any evidence, that the FDA may have been playing favorites. "[The FDA] should not be able to do such damage for possibly political reasons, or maybe because their friends at Pfizer have suggested it," he said. He also didn't lose an opportunity to bring up his favorite subject: his loss in the 2020 presidential election, which he has blamed on everyone from the Supreme Court to other Republican politicians to the pharmaceutical companies that worked with his administration to craft a vaccine. "Remember, it was the FDA working with Pfizer, who announced the vaccine approval two days after the 2020 presidential election," he said in his Tuesday statement.

He then finished off the statement by boasting about vaccine development under his administration, and called for the Johnson & Johnson shot to be back in action quickly. Tim O'Donnell

President Biden on Tuesday eulogized the late Capitol Police office William "Billy" Evans as he lies in honor in the Capitol Rotunda.

Biden described Evans, who was killed in the line of duty earlier this month when a driver slammed into Evans and another officer in a suspected attack on the Capitol, as a "hero." During the "intimate" address, Biden spoke directly to Evans' wife and two young children, telling them their husband and father is "still with you."

The president said that although he didn't personally know Evans, he knew people like him growing up. "He was the one who always kept his word," Biden said. "If he said he'd be there, he'd be there. He was the one who ... wasn't capable of saying 'no' when you needed him."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also spoke, calling Evans a "martyr for our democracy." Tim O'Donnell

President Biden is set to announce that all American troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks this year, The Washington Post reports.

Biden will reportedly reveal the new deadline this week, which will come after he said last month that it would be "hard to meet" the May 1 withdrawal deadline set under former President Donald Trump and negotiated with the Taliban.

"It is not my intention to stay there for a long time," Biden said in March. "...We will leave. The question is when we leave."

Biden also said at the time he "can't picture" U.S. troops still being in Afghanistan in 2022.

The president is planning for a "phased withdrawal" from Afghanistan between now and September, the Post writes. CNN confirmed the news that the roughly 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan will be withdrawn but noted it wasn't "immediately clear what will happen to several hundred U.S. special operations forces there."

But the Post quoted a source familiar with the deliberations as saying, "If we break the May 1st deadline negotiated by the previous administration with no clear plan to exit, we will be back at war with the Taliban, and that was not something President Biden believed was in the national interest." Brendan Morrow

The White House does not appear to be concerned about whether the Food and Drug Administration's recommendation to pause the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine may hinder its distribution strategy.

Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said in a statement Tuesday that because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine makes up only a small percentage of the recorded shots in the U.S., the federal plan should remain intact without any major hiccups. "Over the last few weeks, we have made available more than 25 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna [vaccines] each week ... This is more than enough supply to continue the current pace of 3 million shots per day, and meet [President Biden's] goal of 200 million shots by his 100th day in office," the statement said.

Johnson & Johnson appointments scheduled for the next several days have already been canceled, but Zients said the Biden administration is working with state and federal partners to reschedule those for a dose of Pfizer or Moderna.

While the math may hold up for the White House's goals, there are still other factors to consider, including whether the FDA's decision leads to any noticeable increase in vaccine hesitancy, regardless of which shots are available. Tim O'Donnell

Former House Speaker John Boehner revealed that in the 2020 election, he voted for former President Donald Trump, whom he would later blast for inciting a "bloody insurrection."

Boehner has recently been promoting his new memoir On the House, and he told Time in an interview published Tuesday that he backed the former president for a second term last year, citing his Supreme Court picks and their agreement on policy issues.

"I voted for Donald Trump," Boehner said. "I thought that his policies, by and large, mirrored the policies that I believed in. I thought the choices for the Supreme Court were top notch. At the end of the day, who gets nominated to the federal courts is really the most important thing a president does."

The revelation came after Boehner didn't hold back against Trump in his book for his actions after the 2020 election, blasting the former president's "bulls---" election fraud claims and saying he "incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons." Boehner also recounted a time when his staffer was berated by Trump during a golf outing before he became president, with Boehner writing that the incident revealed Trump's "real anger" and adding, "we had no idea then what that anger would do to our country."

Boehner also told Time he views Trump as a "product of the chaos we've seen in our political process over the last 10 or 12 years." But when asked if he wishes in retrospect that he had done more to push back on Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Boehner said he didn't feel the need to do so.

"I'm retired," Boehner said. "I try to stay out of the day-to-day rumble of politics. I really didn't need to speak up." Brendan Morrow