Category: National News

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — It may be the holiday season, but police in Kentucky confiscated an unusual gift being delivered to a Kentucky man’s home — a package with about 20 pounds (9 kilograms) of meth that was shipped through the mail inside of an air fryer.

Narcotics officers were able to intercept the parcel containing about $100,000 worth of drugs, Louisville Metro police said in a Facebook post Saturday.

The package was delivered to a suspect’s home where officers obtained a search warrant to collect it, the Major Case Unit confirmed to news outlets. The suspect wasn’t home at time of seizure.

Photos posted by the police department show at least seven packages of drugs wrapped in plastic alongside the Hamilton Beach brand air fryer and the box it came in.

Police say the investigation is ongoing.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (AP) — Investigators were trying to determine why a man “ambushed and executed” a city police officer who was sitting in his patrol car outside police headquarters in a college town in northwest Arkansas.

The Saturday death of Fayetteville Police Officer Stephen Carr was one of three killings of police officers nationwide in a two-day period.

Carr, 27, was a patrol officer in Fayetteville’s Dickson Street entertainment district, an area popular with students at the nearby University of Arkansas, police said. Fayetteville Police Chief Mike Reynolds said Sunday that Carr was sitting in his patrol car Saturday night when a man approached the vehicle and shot him several times at point-blank range.

Two officers who were inside the police station heard the gunfire, ran outside, and opened fire on the suspect, killing him, police said. Authorities on Sunday identified the suspect as London Phillips, 35, of Fayetteville.

The officers who opened fire on Phillips — identified Sunday as Cpl. Seay Floyd and officer Natalie Eucce — are on paid leave pending an internal investigation, police said.

Police said they don’t know why Phillips shot Carr but that they believe Phillips set out to kill a police officer.

“All I know is that this was a cowardly act. I have no information that leads me to believe that he targeted this officer specifically. He was looking for an officer to kill,” Reynolds said during a news conference Sunday.

Reynolds said Phillips used a 9 mm Taurus pistol and had two boxes of ammunition with him.

Fayetteville police had a “brief history” with Phillips, Reynolds said. Police received a call in December 2018 about Phillips impersonating a police officer, he said. In April, Phillips pawned a gun at a local pawn shop. Reynolds said the owner of the shop would not return the gun because Phillips had a medical marijuana card, which disqualifies someone from possessing a gun in Arkansas.

Reynolds became choked up and appeared to fight back tears during the news conference. He said Carr was from Texas and had joined the Fayetteville police department about 2 1/2 years ago. He was a patrol officer who was assigned to the entertainment district.

“He’s a hero,” Reynolds said.

“He was an all-American boy,” he said. “He came from a law enforcement family. He knew what the job was about and he just wanted to serve his community.”

Reynolds said there has been an outpouring of shock, disbelief and support from people in Fayetteville and the surrounding area.

“I think it just proves that we’re not immune and that officers are being targeted every day throughout our country. It’s just unfortunate,” he said.

Fayetteville police have asked the Washington County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI to investigate. A spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office declined to release details of the investigation Sunday.

The fatal Arkansas shooting followed the shooting death of a Houston police officer Saturday night and the killing of an Alabama police officer on Friday.

LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) — Russia was slapped Monday with a four-year ban from international sports events, including next summer’s Tokyo Olympics, over a longstanding doping scandal, although its athletes will still be able to compete if they can show they are clean competitors.

The ruling by the World Anti-Doping Agency’s executive committee means that Russia’s flag, name and anthem will not appear at the Tokyo Games, and the country also could be stripped of hosting world championships in Olympic sports.

The sanctions are the harshest punishment yet for Russian state authorities who were accused of tampering with a Moscow laboratory database. Russia’s anti-doping agency can appeal the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport within 21 days — an action it has signaled it would take.

Russian athletes will be allowed to compete in major events only if they are not implicated in positive doping tests or if their data was not manipulated, according to the WADA ruling.

For soccer’s 2022 World Cup, WADA said the Russian team will play under its name in the qualifying program in Europe. If it qualifies for Qatar, the name will have be changed to something neutral that likely would not include the word “Russia.”

Legal fallout from the WADA ruling seems sure to dominate preparations for the Tokyo Olympics, which open on July 24.

Evidence shows that Russian authorities tampered with a Moscow laboratory database to hide hundreds of potential doping cases and falsely shift the blame onto whistleblowers, WADA investigators and the International Olympic Committee said last month.

“Flagrant manipulation” of the Moscow lab data was “an insult to the sporting movement worldwide,” the IOC said last month.

WADA’s inability to fully expel Russia from the Tokyo Olympics and 2022 Beijing Winter Games frustrated the doping watchdog’s vice president.

“I’m not happy with the decision we made today. But this is as far as we could go,” said Linda Helleland, a Norwegian lawmaker who serves on WADA executive committee and has long pushed for a tougher line against Russia. “This is the biggest sports scandal the world has ever seen. I would expect now a full admission from the Russians and for them to apologize on all the pain all the athletes and sports fans have experienced.”

Handing over a clean database to WADA was a key requirement for Russia to help bring closure to a scandal that has tainted the Olympics over the last decade.

Although the IOC has called for the strongest possible sanctions, it wants those sanctions directed at Russian state authorities rather than athletes or Olympic officials.

That position was opposed by most of WADA’s athlete commission. It wanted the kind of blanket ban Russia avoided for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics and the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games after a state-run doping program was exposed by media and WADA investigations after Russia hosted the 2014 Olympics in Sochi.

“This entire fiasco created by Russia has cheated far too many athletes of their dreams and rightful careers, for far too long,” the WADA athlete panel said in a statement ahead of the meeting.

That must be filed by the Russian anti-doping agency, known as RUSADA. That body was declared non-compliant on Monday, 15 months after it was reinstated by WADA in defiance of athlete opposition.

The decision to appeal has been stripped from RUSADA chief executive Yuri Ganus, an independent figure criticizing Russian authorities’ conduct on the doping data issue. Authority was passed to the agency’s supervisory board after an intervention led by the Russian Olympic Committee.

The ROC on Saturday labeled the expected sanctions as “illogical and inappropriate.”

Russia has stuck to its claim that deceptive edits in the data were in fact made by WADA’s star witness, Grigory Rodchenkov. The former Moscow lab director’s flight into the witness protection program in the United States was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary.

Technical reasons were claimed — and debunked by WADA investigators — for why the data appeared to have been edited shortly before the delayed handover in January.

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AP Sports Writer James Ellingworth in Duesseldorf, Germany, contributed.

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PORT NECHES, Texas (AP) — Concerns over air quality have prompted a voluntary evacuation order that was in effect Thursday for a Texas Gulf Coast city where a pair of chemical plant explosions occurred last week.

Port Neches issued the voluntary order for its 50,000 residents late Wednesday after elevated levels of the chemical butadiene were detected. Jefferson County emergency management officials said the elevated levels did not pose a serious health risk, but could cause dizziness, nausea, headaches or irritation to the eyes and throat.

Butadiene is a chemical used to make synthetic rubber and other products.

The first explosion happened early Nov. 27 at the TPC Group plant about 80 miles (129 kilometers) east of Houston and was so powerful it shattered windows and ripped doors off hinges of nearby homes. A second blast occurred about 13 hours later, and the fire wasn’t contained until Nov. 29.

The blast sent a huge plume of smoke into the air that was visible for miles.

The explosion was the latest in a series of high-profile accidents this year up and down the Texas Gulf Coast, which is home to the highest concentration of oil refineries in the nation. In July, an explosion at an ExxonMobil refinery in Baytown left more than dozen people with minor injuries and put nearby residents under a shelter-in-place advisory for three hours.

PARIS (AP) — The Eiffel Tower shut down, France’s vaunted high-speed trains stood still and several thousand people protested in Paris as unions launched open-ended, nationwide strikes Thursday over the government’s plan to overhaul the retirement system.

Paris authorities barricaded the presidential palace and deployed 6,000 police as activists – many in yellow vests representing France’s year-old movement for economic justice – gathered in the capital in a mass outpouring of anger at President Emmanuel Macron and his centerpiece reform.

Unions and their supporters fear that the changes to how and when workers can retire will threaten the hard-fought French way of life. Macron himself remained “calm and determined” to push it through, according to a top presidential official.

The Louvre Museum warned of strike disruptions, and subway stations across Paris shut their gates. Many visitors – including the U.S. energy secretary – canceled plans to travel to one of the world’s most-visited countries amid the strike.

Unprepared tourists discovered historic train stations standing empty Thursday, with about nine out of 10 of high-speed TGV trains canceled. Signs at Paris’ Orly Airport showed “canceled” notices, as the civil aviation authority announced 20% of flights were grounded.

Some travelers showed support for the striking workers, but others complained about being embroiled in someone else’s fight.

“I had no idea about the strike happening, and I was waiting for two hours in the airport for the train to arrive and it didn’t arrive,” said vacationer Ian Crossen, from New York. “I feel a little bit frustrated. And I’ve spent a lot of money. I’ve spent money I didn’t need to, apparently.”

Vladimir Madeira, a Chilean tourist vacationing in Paris, said the strike has been “a nightmare.” He hadn’t heard about the protest until he arrived, and transport disruptions foiled his plans to travel directly to Zurich.

Beneath the closed Eiffel Tower, tourists from Thailand, Canada and Spain echoed those sentiments.

Bracing for possible violence along the route of the Paris march, police ordered all businesses, cafes and restaurants in the area to close. Authorities banned protests in the more sensitive neighborhoods around the Champs-Elysees avenue, presidential palace, parliament and Notre Dame Cathedral.

Police carried out security checks of more than 6,000 people arriving for the protest and detained 65 even before it started. Embassies warned tourists to avoid the protest area.

The mood was impassioned in the crowd massed on Boulevard Magenta in eastern Paris.

Health workers showed up to decry conditions in hospitals. Students pointed to recent student suicides and demanded government action. Environmentalists emphasized that climate justice and social justice are one and the same. And young and old roundly condemned the new retirement plan, which they fear would take money out of their pockets and reduce the period of repose the French expect in the last decades of their lives.

Eric Mettling, who joined the yellow vests at the start of their movement, said the general strike had brought together social movements across France in a manner unprecedented in recent memory to denounce “the social crisis.”

Skirmishes broke out between police firing tear gas and protesters throwing flares at a protest in the western French city of Nantes, and thousands of red-vested union activists marched through cities from Marseille on the Mediterranean to Lille in the north.

Lacking public transport, commuters used shared bikes or electric scooters despite near-freezing temperatures. Many workers in the Paris region worked from home or took a day off to stay with their children, since 78% of teachers in the capital were on strike.

The big question is how long the strike will last. Transport Minister Elisabeth Borne said she expects the travel troubles to be just as bad Friday, and unions said they’ll maintain the Paris subway system strike at least through Monday.

Public sector workers fear Macron’s reform will force them to work longer and shrink their pensions. Some private sector workers share their worries, while others welcome the reform.

Joseph Kakou, who works an overnight security shift in western Paris, walked an hour to get home to the eastern side of town Thursday morning.

“It doesn’t please us to walk. It doesn’t please us to have to strike,” Kakou told The Associated Press. “But we are obliged to, because we can’t work until 90 years old.”

To Macron, the retirement reform is central to his plan to transform France so it can compete globally in the 21st century. The government argues France’s 42 retirement systems need streamlining.

While Macron respects the right to strike, he “is convinced that the reform is needed, he is committed, that’s the project he presented the French in 2017” during his election campaign, the presidential official said. The official was not authorized to be publicly named.

After extensive meetings with workers, the high commissioner for pensions is expected to detail reform proposals next week, and the prime minister will release the government’s plan days after that.

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Claire Parker, Alex Turnbull, Nicolas Garriga, Mstyslav Chernov, Francois Mori in Paris contributed to this report.

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — An active duty U.S. sailor whose submarine was docked at Pearl Harbor opened fire on three civilian employees Wednesday, killing two and then taking his own life just days before dignitaries and veterans descend on the base for the 78th anniversary of the Japanese attack.

The commander of Navy Region Hawaii, Rear Adm. Robert Chadwick, said he didn’t know the motive behind the shooting at the Hawaii base’s naval shipyard that left the third civilian Department of Defense employee hospitalized.

It also wasn’t known if the sailor and the three male civilians had any type of relationship, or what the motive was for the shooting, Chadwick said.

“We have no indication yet whether they were targeted or if it was a random shooting,” Chadwick said.

The sailor was assigned to the fast attack submarine USS Columbia, which is at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam for maintenance. Details about the sailor were not immediately released.

It wasn’t immediately known what type of weapon was used or how many shots were fired. Chadwick said that was part of the investigation. Personal weapons are not allowed on base.

Names of the victims won’t be released until next of kin have been notified.

“Our thoughts are with the families of the victims and everyone involved. I can say that we are mobilizing support services for naval shipyard personnel as well as everyone else who may be affected by this tragic event,” Chadwick said.

The base went into lockdown around 2:30 p.m. when the first active shooter reports were received. The base reopened a few hours later. Witnesses were still being interviewed hours after the shooting.

The shipyard repairs, maintains and modernizes the ships and submarines of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, which is headquartered at Pearl Harbor. The base is the home port for 10 destroyers and 15 submarines. It also hosts Air Force units.

Hawaii Gov. David Ige said the White House has offered assistance from federal agencies and that the state is also ready to help if needed.

“I join in solidarity with the people of Hawaii as we express our heartbreak over this tragedy and concern for those affected by the shooting,” Ige said in a statement.

The shipyard is across the harbor from the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, which on Saturday will mark the 78th anniversary of the Japanese bombing that propelled the U.S. into World War II. More than 2,300 Americans died in the attack on Dec. 7, 1941.

The shipyard has played a key role in naval history, most notably during World War II. Shipyard workers were given just days to repair the USS Yorktown, an aircraft carrier severely damaged during the Battle of the Coral Seat in 1942 because the Navy needed to quickly send the ship to Midway to meet Japanese forces there.

Some 1,400 shipyard workers labored around the clock for almost 72 hours to patch the carrier together. The planes the Yorktown delivered to Midway sank one of the four aircraft carriers Japan sent to the battle and helped destroy two others. The Battle of Midway turned the tide of the war in the United States’ favor.

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Two Mississippi cities paid thousands of dollars to provide police protection when President Donald Trump attended rallies there in the past year.

Neither Tupelo nor Biloxi is asking the Trump campaign to pay the costs, The Clarion Ledger reported. Some cities in the U.S. have requested reimbursement after similar Trump events.

Tupelo has about 40,000 residents, and the city spent about $4,775 to provide security when the president held a campaign rally Nov. 1, just four days before Mississippi’s election for governor and other state offices.

The sum covered police overtime costs, but it did not include the price to operate the city-owned BancorpSouth Arena, where the rally was held. The arena rental bill was paid by the Trump campaign, said Kim Hanna, the city’s chief financial officer.

“The security cost as far as overtime, to me, that’s a non-issue for the city,” said Tupelo Mayor Jason Shelton, a Democrat. “Regardless of who the president is, it’s up to every level of government to protect his or her safety. That’s part of the job of operating a city.”

In 2018, Biloxi paid about $11,000 in extra police and fire department costs to host the president at the Mississippi Gulf Coast Coliseum, said Mike Leonard, the city’s chief administrative officer. The city has about 46,000 residents.

Biloxi never requested reimbursement for security costs after a 2018 rally that Trump held at the Coast Coliseum in support of Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Leonard said. In that case, Trump also paid to rent the coliseum, though the city doesn’t benefit financially from the venue.

Leonard said the city also spent about $10,000 in police and fire costs to host Vice President Mike Pence at the coliseum last month, the day before the Mississippi elections.

Shelton said a presidential visit boosts Tupelo’s economy, with people traveling from around the region to see Trump.

Tupelo has now hosted the president twice in a year. It has also faced expenses from tornadoes.

“We’re getting more experience than we need,” Shelton said. Still, he said, “the president coming to Tupelo is neat — people getting to see Air Force One, people getting to see the presidential motorcade. If you haven’t seen those things, it’s a sight to behold.”

HOUSTON (AP) — A local judge in South Texas has ordered supporters of President Donald Trump not to build their planned private border wall on a section of land near the Rio Grande.

State District Judge Keno Vasquez on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order against We Build the Wall, which raised $25 million after promising to build its own private barrier. Vasquez set a Dec. 17 hearing for We Build the Wall and its founder, Brian Kolfage, to appear in court in the South Texas city of Edinburg.

We Build the Wall announced on Facebook last month that it was starting construction on private land next to the Rio Grande, the river that separates the U.S. and Mexico in Texas. It posted videos that showed a construction foreman describing plans to install posts a short distance from the riverbank.

The announcement drew immediate criticism from the nonprofit National Butterfly Center, which is located near the site and filed the motion for the temporary restraining order. Wall opponents who say private construction could worsen erosion or push floodwaters onto other people’s property in a storm.

The butterfly center and the advocacy group EarthJustice issued a statement Wednesday calling We Build the Wall’s plans “illegal.”

“The incredible biodiversity found here, supported and enhanced by 17 years of labor and millions of dollars of investment, is integral to the health of a fragile, but vibrant ecosystem and warrants protection against this unlawful incursion,” said Dr. Jeffrey Glassberg, president of the North American Butterfly Association, in a statement.

The plans also drew the attention of the International Boundary and Water Commission, an agency set up by the U.S. and Mexico under treaty obligations where both sides agree to cooperate on any changes to the riverbank that could affect the other side.

The commission has asked We Build the Wall and Fisher Industries, its construction partner, for more information. Kolfage on Wednesday re-affirmed that his organization won’t begin construction until it gets the commission’s approval.

Kolfage said We Build the Wall overcame local opposition on its first project — less than 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) built near El Paso, Texas — that included pushback from officials and the water commission. So far, the construction in Sunland Park, New Mexico, is the only barrier the group has built since its founding in December 2018.

“The courts will prevail in our favor because, obviously, what we’re doing is legal,” he said, adding that claims to the contrary were “100% false.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House released a sweeping impeachment report Tuesday outlining evidence of what it calls President Donald Trump’s wrongdoing toward Ukraine, findings that will serve as the foundation for debate over whether the 45th president should be removed from office.

The 300-page report from Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee makes the case that Trump misused the power of his office and, in the course of their investigation, obstructed Congress by stonewalling the proceedings. Based on two months of investigation, the report contains evidence and testimony from current and former U.S. officials.

“The impeachment inquiry has found that President Trump, personally and acting through agents within and outside of the U.S. government, solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, to benefit his reelection,” said Chairman Adam Schiff in the report’s preface.

In doing so, “the President placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security,” the report said.

The report does not render a judgment on whether Trump’s actions stemming from a July 25 phone call with Ukraine president rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors” warranting impeachment, leaving that to Congress to decide.

Instead, “The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment inquiry Report” provides a detailed, if stunning, account of a shadow diplomacy run by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, resulting in layers of allegations, which can be distilled into specific acts like bribery, extortion or obstruction, and the more amorphous allegation that Trump abused his power by putting his interests above the nation.

The House intelligence panel will vote later Tuesday, in what is expected to be a party-line tally, to send the document to the Judiciary Committee ahead of a landmark impeachment hearing Wednesday.

“With the release of our report, the American people can review for themselves the evidence detailing President Trump’s betrayal of the public trust,” Schiff said in a joint statement with the chairmen of the Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committee, who drafted the report.

In a statement, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said “Chairman Schiff and the Democrats utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump.” She said the report “reads like the ramblings of a basement blogger straining to prove something when there is evidence of nothing.”

Ahead of the release, Republicans defended the president in a rebuttal claiming Trump never intended to pressure Ukraine when he asked for a “favor” — investigations of Democrats and Joe Biden. They say the military aid the White House was withholding was not being used as leverage, as Democrats claim, and besides the $400 million was ultimately released, although only after a congressional outcry.

Trump at the opening of a NATO leaders’ meeting in London on Tuesday criticized the impeachment push as “unpatriotic” and “a bad thing for our country.”

In prefacing the report, Schiff draws deeply from history, citing George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and other Founding Fathers, to explain grounds for impeachment.

“Rather than a mechanism to overturn an election, impeachment was explicitly contemplated as a remedy of last resort for a president who fails to faithfully execute his oath of office ‘to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,’” he wrote.

The report will lay the foundation for the House Judiciary Committee to assess potential articles of impeachment starting Wednesday, presenting a history-making test of political judgment with a case that is dividing Congress and the country.

Trump said he will not watch the judiciary panel’s hearing, saying it’s “all nonsense, they’re just wasting their time.”

Democrats once hoped to sway Republicans to consider Trump’s removal, but they are now facing the prospect of an ever-hardening partisan split over the swift-moving proceedings on impeaching the president.

For Republicans offering an early rebuttal ahead of the report’s public release, the proceedings are simply a “hoax,” with Trump insisting he did nothing wrong and his GOP allies in line behind him.

Trump has criticized the House for pushing forward with the proceedings while he was overseas, a breach of political decorum that traditionally leaves partisan differences at the water’s edge.

He predicted Republicans would actually benefit from the impeachment effort against him.

For the Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi faces a critical moment of her leadership as she steers the process ahead after resisting the impeachment inquiry through the summer, warning at the time that it was too divisive for the country and required bipartisan support.

Possible grounds for impeachment are focused on whether Trump abused his office as he pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in a July 25 phone call to open investigations into Trump’s political rivals. At the time, Trump was withholding $400 million in military aid, jeopardizing key support as Ukraine faces an aggressive Russia at its border.

The report also accuses Trump of obstructing the House constitutional authority to conduct the impeachment inquiry, becoming the “first and only” president in U.S. history to “openly and indiscriminately” defy the proceedings by instructing officials not to comply with subpoenas for documents and testimony.

The next step comes when the Judiciary Committee gavels open its own hearing with legal experts to assess the findings and consider potential articles of impeachment ahead of a possible vote by the full House by Christmas. That would presumably send it to the Senate for a trial in January.

For Democrats marching into what is now a largely partisan process, the political challenge if they proceed is to craft the impeachment articles in a way that will draw the most support from their ranks and not expose Pelosi’s majority to messy divisions, especially as Republicans stand lock-step with the president.

While liberal Democrats are pushing the party to go further and incorporate the findings from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and other actions by Trump, more centrist and moderate Democrats prefer to stick with the Ukraine matter as a simpler narrative that Americans understand.

Trump’s campaign is spending robustly to run ads against front-line freshmen lawmakers, many from districts Trump won in 2016 but that flipped in 2018 to give Democrats the majority and Pelosi will be protective of these lawmakers as the proceedings unfold.

House Republicans preempted the report’s public release with their own 123-page rebuttal.

In it, they claim there’s no evidence Trump pressured Zelenskiy. Instead, they say Democrats just want to undo the 2016 election. Republicans dismiss witness testimony of a shadow diplomacy being run Giuliani, and they rely on the president’s insistence that he was merely concerned about “corruption” in Ukraine — though the White House transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelenskiy never mentions the word.

“They are trying to impeach President Trump because some unelected bureaucrats chafed at an elected President’s ‘outside the beltway’ approach to diplomacy,” according to the report from Republican Reps. Devin Nunes of California, Jim Jordan of Ohio and Michael McCaul of Texas.

Democrats could begin drafting articles of impeachment against the president in a matter of days, with voting in the Judiciary Committee next week.

Republicans on the committee, led by Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia, plan to use procedural moves to stall the process and portray the inquiry as unfair to the president.

The White House declined an invitation to participate in Wednesday’s hearing, with counsel Pat Cipollone denouncing the proceedings as a “baseless and highly partisan inquiry” in a letter to Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.

Trump had previously suggested that he might be willing to offer written testimony under certain conditions, though aides suggested they did not anticipate Democrats would ever agree to them.

Cipollone demanded more information from Democrats before Trump would decide whether to participate in additional hearings.

Nadler said Monday if the president really thought his call with Ukraine was “perfect,” as he repeatedly says, he would “provide exculpatory information that refutes the overwhelming evidence of his abuse of power.”

House rules provide the president and his attorneys the right to cross-examine witnesses and review evidence before the committee, but little ability to bring forward witnesses of their own.

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Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Colleen Long, Eric Tucker and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.