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Capital Journal |
Good morning from the WSJ Washington bureau. We produce this newsletter each weekday to deliver exclusive insights and analysis from our reporting team in Washington. Sign up. |
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Biden Administration: President Biden and first lady Jill Biden visit Surfside, Fla., where a condo collapsed last week. The death toll from the collapse stands at 18 and 145 people remain unaccounted for. The Bidens will meet with Florida officials, first responders and families of residents. Jobless Claims: Worker filings for jobless benefits are projected to have resumed a decline last week after stalling out in mid-June. Jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, are down by more than 40% since the first week of April, but remain about double pre-pandemic levels. Supreme Court: The court is expected to release opinions. Exxon Mobil: Chief Executive Darren Woods apologized and disavowed statements made by two of the company’s top Washington lobbyists after an environmental group released a video recording of their dismissing its public positions on climate change. In Memoriam: Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and an advocate of measures to streamline and modernize the American military, has died at 88. WSJ and support our work with a special subscription offer. |
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| Allen Weisselberg is the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, the family business of former President Donald Trump. PHOTO: CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS |
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The Trump Organization’s finance chief, Allen Weisselberg, surrendered to New York prosecutors this morning as he and the company’s lawyers prepared to face the first criminal charges stemming from a multiyear investigation into former President Donald Trump’s business affairs, report Corinne Ramey, Deanna Paul and Rebecca Ballhaus. Mr. Trump has accused the prosecutors, both Democrats, of being politically motivated. The district attorney’s office filed an indictment Wednesday against the Trump Organization and Mr. Weisselberg on charges that will be made public this afternoon, The Wall Street Journal has reported. The defendants are expected to be arraigned on allegations that the company and Mr. Weisselberg illegally evaded taxes on fringe benefits. Mr. Weisselberg and the Trump Organization, represented by its lawyers, are expected to plead not guilty, as is typical in most arraignments. |
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| The select panel about the Jan. 6 attack will be made up of 13 members of Congress appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. PHOTO: MICHAEL A. MCCOY/BLOOMBERG NEWS |
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The House voted largely along party lines, 222-190, to establish a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. The committee’s work is expected to go beyond the findings of a bipartisan Senate investigation of the U.S. intelligence and security failures on and before Jan. 6, report Lindsay Wise and Rachael Levy. Only two Republicans broke with their party leaders and voted yes: Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming. The committee, which will be controlled by Democratic lawmakers, will have subpoena power to find out what led to the attack and to examine the preparedness and response of law-enforcement agencies. Also within the panel’s scope will be government intelligence collection, analysis and the sharing of that information ahead of Jan. 6. |
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Republican Sens. Pat Toomey and Ron Johnson want more information from the nation’s biggest 401(k)-type plan on how money managers BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors cast shareholder votes on behalf of government savers, reports Dawn Lim. |
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182,285,056 cases world-wide and 3,948,723 deaths. 33,666,198 cases in the U.S. and 604,718 deaths. Source: Johns Hopkins University, as of 8 a.m. ET. |
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A WHO-led team wants an examination of the farms that supplied the market where early cases emerged. There's one big problem: Almost all the animals are gone, complicating the search for the pandemic’s source, report Jeremy Page, Betsy McKay and Drew Hinshaw. |
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People who became infected after getting a messenger RNA vaccine carried less virusand had shorter cases than unvaccinated people who became infected, government health researchers found. |
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Delta is now the most common circulating Covid-19 variant in the U.S., but the CDC says fully vaccinated Americans don’t necessarily need to wear masks. |
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Robinhood Financial is paying $70 million to settle a probe into its approval of risky strategies for ineligible traders and glitches that locked millions out of trading, Dave Michaels reports. Robinhood neither admitted nor denied the claims. The online brokerage's forthcoming initial public offering is one of the most anticipated of the year. “We’re fine with innovation, but innovation can’t be at the cost of creating compliance and supervision systems,” said Jessica Hopper, enforcement chief at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Robinhood opened 90,000 accounts from 2016 to 2018 despite red flags signaling possible fraud, Finra said, and qualified thousands of others to trade options even though the clients didn’t meet eligibility criteria. Separately, the trading app is allocating up to 35% of its IPO shares to individual investors as part of a strategy to bring IPO investing to the masses. |
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| Lina Khan, who was designated FTC chairwoman this month, has been a leading critic of dominant technology companies. PHOTO: GRAEME JENNINGS/POOL/SHUTTERSTOCK |
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Amazon.com filed a request with the FTC seeking the recusal of Chairwoman Lina Khan from antitrust probes of the company because of her extensive past criticisms of the online giant, reports Brent Kendall. Ms. Khan gets the first opportunity to address the request for her disqualification, but past FTC practices suggest it is likely the rest of the commissioners would have a say. |
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35.3 million | The IRS ended the tax-filing season with more than four times the number of unprocessed tax returns it had during the last pre-pandemic filing season in 2019, according to a new report. |
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Republican senators are rallying against one of the main methods the Biden administration has proposed to pay for infrastructure improvements: a big infusion of money to bulk up the Internal Revenue Service. (Axios) A rule letting House members vote remotely, instituted to protect them during the coronavirus, now is being widely used for other reasons, including so they can attend political events. (CNN) President Biden has fallen behind former President Donald Trump's record-slow pace in nominating ambassadors. (Bloomberg) |
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This newsletter is a production of the WSJ Washington bureau. Our newsletter editors are Kate Milani, Troy McCullough, James Graff, and Toula Vlahou. Send feedback to [email protected]. You can follow politics coverage on our Politics page and at @wsjpolitics on Twitter. |
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