Election interference

Former President Donald Trump will make history this week as the only U.S. president to be impeached twice and the first to undergo trial after leaving office.

"Our system isn't what we thought it was," Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Monday. "It's not as fair as it should be, not even close."

A Facebook group encouraging people to interfere in the election reached over 300,000 members before it was deleted by Facebook.

"The truth is simple—only Russia has both the capability and intent to significantly disrupt our election," Senator Chris Murphy said.

The same group accused of meddling in the 2016 elections has been found by an FBI investigation to run a right-wing news site targeting U.S. voters ahead of the 2020 election.

In a trend reminiscent of 2016, China's efforts to interfere in the U.S. election has divided the American political class, largely because Beijing's efforts appear less threatening than Moscow's brutish maneuvers.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said President Donald Trump is "willfully fanning the flames" of racial unrest and violence because his campaign believes it helps his re-election chances.

"We're not having a summit with Vladimir Putin before the election," Robert O'Brien said.

United States intelligence agencies warned Russia and China are actively involved in 2020 election interference, but the two countries are not using their efforts to "denigrate" the same presidential candidate.

Democrats notified the FBI over concerns Russia is "laundering" intelligence directed against former Vice President Joe Biden through a GOP-led Senate committee.

Consequences could include financial-sector sanctions, asset freezes, cyber responses, or other actions, "depending on the nature of the attack," Biden wrote.

The head of Russia's parliamentary foreign affairs committee, Leonid Slutsky, said the statement by foreign secretary Dominic Raab was "Russophobic."

We cannot let misinformation—whether it comes from the White House, the Kremlin or anywhere else—sow seeds of doubt in our elections.

Americans are understandably bruised by election tampering. But mistrusting the process itself does not make our democracy any stronger.

A Tuesday afternoon meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov ended with Lavrov later contraindicating the White House's readout of the meeting, in which Trump warned Lavrov against Russian election interference.

Activists approached Alaska representative Don Young to ask him about foreign interference in our elections. He responded with a swift headbutt to their camera.

"Hillary does—and did—drive many people into the arms of Donald Trump. Her attack on Tulsi does likewise," the Republican-turned-Independent congressman tweeted shortly after 1 a.m.

As people are calling on Facebook to do more to stop the spread of misinformation ahead of the 2020 election, CEO Mark Zuckerberg doubled down on his refusal to "police" the company's broad interpretation of political speech.

A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report says that after investigating Russia's social media tactics from 2016, the president needs to publicly state the dangers associated with foreign election interference ahead of 2020.

California Senator Kamala Harris accused Russia of deliberately using racism to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential elections and provoke Americans into fighting against each another.

Just five days earlier, Romney disapproved of Trump's remark he would consider taking information from a foreign country and reporting "something wrong" to the FBI.

The president expressed an openness to receiving opposition research on his political opponents from foreign adversaries in an ABC News interview this week.

"Considering that we have met over the past two weeks for two times, that's a reason for some optimism," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

President Donald Trump has claimed he was given no such warning.

Election interference is not the main thing Americans should be worried about, said an adviser to the Russian president.

"I have been fully briefed on the investigation, and I look forward to director Mueller delivering the report," Whitaker said.

The president phoned a New York Times reporter after a meeting with the Russian leader at the 2017 G20 summit and said he accepted Putin's denial.

The U.S. national intelligence community is concerned, but actual interference has not yet been proven.

"There will be great and fast economic retaliation against China if our farmers, ranchers and/or industrial workers are targeted!" Trump tweeted.

"The president is the only one in the government that hasn't been paying attention to this," James Lankford told CNN.