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A Manhattan grand jury voted to indict Donald J. Trump on Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, according to four people with knowledge of the matter, a historic development that will shake up the 2024 presidential race and forever mark him as the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges.

NEW YORK -- Federal officials have been told to expect that a medical examiner's findings on Jeffrey Epstein's death will be released Friday. That's according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke to The Associated Press. The person could not discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

The Justice Department on Friday indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian groups of violating criminal laws with the intent to interfere with "with U.S. elections and political processes", according to agency. According to the agency, "the indictment charges all of the defendants with conspiracy to defraud the United States, three defendants with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and five defendants with aggravated identity theft." The indictment says that some defendants "communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign" without revealing their association with Russia. The indictment also says the defendants posted negative information about a...

The special counsel's office said Friday that a federal grand jury indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities in the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The indictment says that the defendants allegedly, by early to mid 2016, were "supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump ... and disparaging Hillary Clinton." An announcement from special counsel Robert Mueller's office said that the government accuses all the defendants of conspiracy to defraud the United States. Three defendants are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud. Five defendants are charged with aggravated identity theft.

A federal grand jury in the District of Columbia on Friday indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities accused of interfering in U.S. elections. The announcement came from the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. According to the special counsel, the indictment charges the defendants with conspiracy to defraud the United States, three defendants with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud and five defendants with aggravated identity theft. *snip* Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is scheduled to hold a press conference Friday afternoon.

The Obama administration caved to a judge’s order Friday and sent documents from the botched Fast & Furious gun-running operation to Congress, complying with a subpoena the House Oversight Committee issued years ago. President Obama had claimed executive privilege in trying to shield the documents from Congress, but a federal judge rejected that, insisting lawmakers had a right to see the information in order to complete their investigation into an operation that saw thousands of guns trafficked into Mexico, with the administration’s knowledge. With just hours to go before the judge’s 60-day deadline, the administration complied Friday. “As we’ve long...

A Bad Day for Preferred Narratives Noah Rothman Everything was going as planned at President Barack Obama's Thursday evening town hall on gun control when the unexpected occurred. A woman, a mother, a victim of sexual assault in college, someone who according to the overly simplistic center-left perspective should be sympathetic both to Democrats and stricter gun laws, stood up and defended firearm ownership. It was a moment that demonstrated the fragility of narratives and stereotyping. It exposed just how rapidly worldviews predicated on a naïve and one-dimensional typecasting - a trap into which political demographers easily fall - can...

State Department officials released roughly 2,900 pages of Hillary Clinton's private emails early Friday morning, several hours past their target of late Thursday evening. State first set a broad target of somewhere between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Thursday. But as the night wore on, that shifted to a 2 a.m. estimate. They were finally released right around 1 a.m. The late release was on top of State's failure to release all the emails by New Year's Eve. Instead of releasing everything on Dec. 31, State said it needed another few days to finish the group of Clinton messages. The...

The Justice Department is declining to bring charges against Lois Lerner, the former IRS official at the center of a political controversy over the processing of applications for tax-exempt status. Federal prosecutors announced their decision Friday in a letter to members of Congress.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s top aides have belatedly turned over more than 100,000 pages of emails they had kept on personal email accounts, or accounts tied to Mrs. Clinton’s server, the government told a federal judge late Friday. Huma Abedin turned over an estimated 23,000 pages of emails, Philippe Reines gave back 70,000 pages of messages and Cheryl Mills returned somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,870 pages, the Obama administration told Judge Rudolph Contreras in a court filing.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign released a letter from her doctor on Friday attesting to her health and fitness for office, on a day marked by a deluge of other disclosures about her finances and a new batch of emails from her time as secretary of state. The document releases, coming on a summer Friday, began with a letter from Dr. Lisa Bardack, a physician in Mount Kisco, N.Y., near Mrs. Clinton’s Chappaqua home who said she had treated Mrs. Clinton since 2001. Mrs. Clinton is the first presidential candidate in this election cycle to make public a medical letter about...

Haitians eligible to receive green cards in two years soon will be able to wait it out in the United States rather than in Haiti under an expedited family reunification program announced Friday by the Obama administration. Beginning early next year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will implement the Haitian Family Reunification Parole (HFRP) Program to accelerate the reunification of eligible Haitian family members of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, who are living in Haiti and have already been approved for a family-based immigrant visa. There are approximately 100,000 Haitians in the immigration pipeline in Haiti but only...

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said that Friday's resignation of Robert Petzel, a top Veterans Affairs official, was not a voluntary exit. "There is no question that this is a termination of his job there before he was planning to go," McDonough told CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Major Garrett for an interview to air on "Face the Nation" this Sunday. Petzel, the undersecretary for health care at the VA, handed in his resignation to Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki Friday. He had already announced his intention to retire this year and President Obama earlier this month...

The State Department on Friday for the first time blamed specific groups and militants for the 2012 Benghazi attack, designating them as terrorists -- a move that further undermines initial claims the attack was spontaneous. The department announced that it was labeling Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi and Ansar al-Sharia in Darnah as terror organizations, in part over their role in the Benghazi attack. It applied the same label to Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia, over a separate attack on Americans in Tunis. The State Department also labeled as terrorists Sufian bin Qumu, head of the Darnah branch and a former Guantanamo...

Citing “national security interests,” President Obama effectively sidestepped Congress by signing an executive order which enables him to send $500 million to fund Muslim terrorists in the West Bank. The executive order, addressed to Secretary of State John Kerry, was quietly signed Friday afternoon, as the media’s full attention was focused upon a royal birth. In the order, President Obama writes, “I hereby certify that it is important to the national security interests of the United States to waive the provisions of section 7040(a) of the Act as carried forward by the CR, in order to provide funds appropriated to...

It’s 4 p.m. ET as I’m writing this. If you had that time plus “deeper complicity for Holder in the Rosen investigation” in the pool, congrats.We already knew that he signed the warrant for Rosen’s e-mails. Now we know for sure that it wasn’t pro forma. President Good Government announced yesterday that he’s ordered the Attorney General to review the DOJ’s guidelines for snooping on reporters. Imagine how dismayed Eric Holder will be when he finds out what Eric Holder’s done. The Justice Department said on Friday that officials up to Attorney General Eric Holder vetted a decision to search...

........Late Friday night, the EPA said in a news release that it had approved the state rules for part of the state's waterways, but would still impose the federal rules for the rest. According to David Guest of Earthjustice, that means the state rules cover only 15 percent while the new federal rules cover 85 percent — about 100,000 miles of waterways. State DEP officials said they were disappointed the EPA would impose federal rules on any part of the state and vowed to "work with them to craft solutions" to put the state in charge of all pollution rules....

Washington (Platts)--4Nov2011/612 pm EDT/2212 GMT The White House Friday rejected a subpoena issued by the House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee to produce internal communications and other documents related to now-bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra's $535 million loan guarantee. In a letter to the Republican leaders of the committee, White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler called the subpoena a partisan "vast fishing expedition" without legal justification. "The committee's extremely broad request for documents -- now a subpoena -- is a significant intrusion on Executive Branch interests, particularly given that you have not made any effort to tailor the request to...

BREAKING -- The unemployment rate in June rose to 9.2 percent, the government reported Friday morning, as the economy added just 18,000. President Obama will speak about the new data in the Rose Garden at 10:35 a.m., the White House says.

<p>The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits was mostly unchanged last week, evidence that the struggling economy isn't generating many jobs.</p> <p>Unemployment line The Labor Department says unemployment benefit applications ticked down 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 428,000.</p> <p>Applications have topped 400,000 for 12 straight weeks.</p>