|
Capital Journal
|
Good morning from the WSJ Washington Bureau.
|
|
|
New Hampshire: Voters in New Hampshire go to the polls in the nation's first primary of the 2020 election. Here's a guide to the race.
Trump's Day: The president participates in signing ceremony for the Supporting Veterans in STEM Careers Act.
Congress: Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell heads to Capitol Hill for two days of testimony beginning this morning.
T-Mobile Merger: A judge’s approval of T-Mobile US Inc.’s takeover of Sprint Corp. will usher in a new balance of power in the U.S. wireless market.
|
|
|
|
|
Sen. Amy Klobuchar arriving at a Rotary Club event in Nashua, N.H., on Monday. PHOTO: GABRIELA BHASKAR FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
|
|
|
The Democratic presidential candidates made a final sprint across snowy New Hampshire ahead of the state’s Tuesday primary, as party leaders vowed there would be no repeat of the chaos that followed last week’s Iowa caucuses, report Joshua Jamerson and Chad Day.
-
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who represents neighboring Vermont, has enjoyed the top position in surveys of New Hampshire voters for weeks.
-
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who had a strong debate performance last week, leapfrogged Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden into the third position in two late polls.
|
|
Pete Buttigieg is in many ways the man to watch in tonight’s New Hampshire primary. Mr. Buttigieg was the surprise force in Iowa’s caucuses last week, but his prospects moving forward are hard to gauge because the profile he presents is so different from anything seen before, writes Gerald F. Seib.
|
|
Amy Klobuchar declared her campaign was surging—and to make sure supporters got the message, she repeated it at most of her events, reports Tarini Parti.
-
The Minnesota senator is pitching herself as the dark horse in the New Hampshire primary.
-
She came in fifth place in Iowa's Democratic caucuses last week.
-
She has been drawing hundreds of people to her events over the past few days after polling in the single digits and struggling to raise money for much of her campaign.
|
|
President Trump encouraged his supporters to vote in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, urging a rally crowd in Manchester on Monday to cast a ballot for whoever would be easiest for him to beat.
|
|
|
|
Why New Hampshire Matters for the Top 5 Democratic Contenders
|
|
|
|
As the fight for New Hampshire heats up among the Democratic presidential candidates ahead of Tuesday’s primary, here is what’s at stake for the five leading contenders.
|
|
|
Photo: Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
|
|
|
|
•
|
Joe Biden is planning a series of fundraisers in the next three weeks, looking beyond Iowa and New Hampshire (Full story)
|
•
|
Who's running for president? (Graphic)
|
|
|
|
|
Senate Republicans: Trump Had the Right to Fire Vindman, Sondland
|
|
|
|
Senate Republicans are shrugging off President Trump’s dismissal last week of two key witnesses in the impeachment trial from their jobs in the administration.
On Friday, Mr. Trump recalled Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the European Union, and the White House removed Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from his post at the National Security Council. Both Messrs. Vindman and Sondland had testified in the House impeachment inquiry over efforts by the White House to block all testimony.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) denounced the personnel changes as an effort to intimidate future federal employees who might come forward during a congressional investigation.
“This is a textbook case of witness retaliation,” Mr. Schumer said. “If something’s going on wrong in government, don’t we want to encourage government employees to bring that forward? Don’t we? Well, not President Trump, because he is the government.”
But Senate Republicans, almost all of whom voted to acquit Mr. Trump of the impeachment charges last week, said the president was well within his right to make personnel changes.
“The president has every right to decide who serves in the executive branch in jobs particularly that are either directly appointed by him like ambassadors or directly advising him like people at the National Security Council,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R., Mo.).
“It’s the president’s prerogative,” said Sen. Todd Young (R., Ind.)
Some Republicans, including Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.), had encouraged the White House to hold off on firing Mr. Sondland, a major donor to several Senate Republicans.
“Ambassador Sondland was planning on leaving, he’d been there for two years and it was just more of a timing issue than anything,” Mr. Tillis said. “I was just suggesting that we had a little bit longer glide path, but now it is what it is.”
Write to Andrew Duehren at andrew.duehren@wsj.com
|
|
|
Four members of China’s military have been indicted by the U.S. government on charges of hacking into Equifax and plundering sensitive data on nearly 150 million Americans as part of a massive heist that officials said also stole trade secrets from the credit-reporting agency, Aruna Viswanatha, Dustin Volz and Kate O’Keeffe report.
|
|
A new government report says intelligence threats against the U.S. are becoming more complex, diverse and harmful as adversaries turn to innovative hybrid techniques combining traditional spying, economic espionage and cyber operations to steal U.S. secrets, Warren P. Strobel reports.
|
|
|
Amazon.com asked a judge to allow it to depose President Trump in the company’s legal battle to overturn a Pentagon decision awarding a huge cloud-computing contract to rival Microsoft, John D. McKinnon and James V. Grimaldi report.
-
The Amazon motion says that Mr. Trump’s bias against Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos “is a matter of public record. Even before taking office, President Trump campaigned on a promise that Amazon would ‘have problems’ if he became President.”
|
|
|
The Justice Department sued New Jersey and a Washington county late Monday over their laws and policies limiting local cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The moves escalated a Trump administration battle with liberal states and localities that adopt so-called sanctuary policies, reports Michelle Hackman.
|
|
|
|
Special Counsel Investigation
|
|
|
Prosecutors recommended that longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone receive seven to nine years in prison on charges related to his efforts to make contact with WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign, Aruna Viswanatha and Byron Tau report.
-
That would be the longest sentence to stem from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
-
Mr. Stone was found guilty last year of witness tampering, obstruction of a congressional proceeding and lying to Congress.
-
He is scheduled to be sentenced next week.
|
|
|
|
A training exercise in Hogan’s Alley, part of the FBI academy in Quantico, Va. PATRICK AVENTURIER/GAMMA-RAPHO/GETTY IMAGES
|
|
|
The weirdest Subway restaurant in America is inside an FBI training center where the bank gets robbed at least twice a week. Hogan’s Alley is town built for fresh FBI recruits to practice arrests and standoffs in different scenarios. At lunch, crooks and cops call a truce to line up at Subway, the only place in town to get a sandwich, Byron Tau reports.
|
|
|
-
Today's New Hampshire primary may mark the end of the long dominance of that state and Iowa in the early presidential nominating process. (CNN)
-
The door is open for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to have a big impact in the Democratic primaries. (The Hill)
-
North Korea is still enhancing its nuclear and missile programs, an unpublished United Nations report says. (CBS News)
|
|
|
This newsletter is a production of the WSJ Washington bureau. Our newsletter editors are Tim Hanrahan, Kate Milani, Troy McCullough and Daniel Nasaw. Send feedback to capitaljournal@wsj.com. You can follow politics coverage on our Politics page and at @wsjpolitics on Twitter.
|
|