AP News in Brief at 11:04 p.m. EST

Former Trump adviser undercuts GOP impeachment defences

WASHINGTON (AP) — A former White House official said Thursday that President Donald Trump’s top European envoy was sent on a “domestic political errand” seeking investigations of Democrats, stunning testimony that dismantled a main line of the president’s defence in the impeachment inquiry.

In a riveting appearance on Capitol Hill, Fiona Hill also implored Republican lawmakers — and implicitly Trump himself — to stop peddling a “fictional narrative” at the centre of the impeachment probe. She said baseless suggestions that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election bolster Russia as it seeks to sow political divisions in the United States.

Testimony from Hill and David Holmes, a State Department adviser in Kyiv, capped an intense week in the historic inquiry and reinforced the central complaint: that Trump used his leverage over Ukraine, a young Eastern European democracy facing Russian aggression, to pursue political investigations. His alleged actions set off alarms across the U.S. national security and foreign policy apparatus.

Hill had a front row seat to some of Trump’s pursuits with Ukraine during her tenure at the White House. She testified in detail about her interactions with Gordon Sondland, saying she initially suspected the U.S. ambassador to the European Union was overstating his authority to push Ukraine to launch investigations into Democrats. But she says she now understands he was acting on instructions Trump sent through his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

“He was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy,” she testified in a daylong encounter with lawmakers. “And those two things had just diverged.”

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Quid pro quo, domestic errands: Takeaways from impeachment

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump asked a foreign country to investigate a political rival as he enters his re-election campaign. That has been established almost beyond doubt. But Republicans and Democrats agree on little else as they embarked on only the fourth impeachment inquiry in the nation’s history.

One witness explicitly acknowledged a quid pro quo and another spoke of figurative hand grenades and drug deals. A third was the target of disparaging tweets by the president while her testimony was underway.

Here are key takeaways from two weeks of hearings.

THIS FOR THAT

In the most anticipated testimony, Gordon Sondland, the European Union ambassador, repeatedly described the administration’s dealings with Ukraine as a quid pro quo — one thing in return for another.

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AP FACT CHECK: Trump, GOP claims on Ukraine corruption

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and his GOP allies pressed a defence Thursday that he acted appropriately in withholding military aid to Ukraine out of concern over the country’s corruption and claimed the House impeachment hearings amounted to a rogue process.

The claims don’t match up with known facts.

A look at some of the remarks on Day 5 of public hearings in the impeachment inquiry by the House Intelligence Committee and Trump’s response:

CALIFORNIA REP. DEVIN NUNES, the top Republican on the committee: “President Trump had good reason to be wary of Ukrainian election meddling against his campaign.”

THE FACTS: That’s not credible. The theory that Ukrainians interfered in the U.S. election and that Democrats co-operated in that effort is unsubstantiated.

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Leading white Democrats court black votes; some find trouble

ATLANTA (AP) — Coming out of their debate in a key centre of black America, the leading Democratic presidential contenders aimed Thursday for the party’s crucial black and minority vote, with the scramble putting internal party tensions on display.

From black protesters disrupting Elizabeth Warren to the lone black woman in the race chiding white, upstart Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the dynamics in Atlanta highlighted the push for crucial black and other minority support with less than three months before primary voting begins. They further underscored some candidates’ vulnerabilities in trying to assemble the coalition necessary to win the nomination — and defeat President Donald Trump in the general election.

Warren electrified a raucous and racially diverse crowd in the Clark-Atlanta University gymnasium as she tries to expand her support beyond the white liberal base that boosted her in the primary polls this summer. But the Massachusetts senator had to endure protests of a black school-choice group that threatened to overshadow her message aimed squarely at black women — Democrats’ most loyal faction.

Buttigieg, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor who leads caucus polls in overwhelmingly white Iowa, spent the day defending remarks relating his experience as a gay man to the systemic racism facing African Americans. Kamala Harris, the California senator and only black woman in the race, blasted his approach as “naive.”

Like Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders invoked his biography, as the child of an immigrant family with casualties in the Holocaust, to connect with African Americans’ struggle against oppression and white supremacy. Harris, still lagging the front-runners, has not criticized the way Sanders talks about race, but the Vermont senator still must prove he can get more black votes than he did in losing the 2016 nominating fight.

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Lawsuit: Church pressured victims into unfair settlements

NEW YORK (AP) — Two impoverished Mississippi men who say they were sexually assaulted by Franciscan missionaries filed a federal lawsuit Thursday claiming that Catholic officials pressured them into signing settlements that paid them little money and required them to remain silent about the alleged abuse.

The lawsuit, filed in New York, claims the church officials drew up the agreements a year ago to prevent the men from telling their stories or going to court — a violation of a 2002 promise by American bishops to abandon the use of nondisclosure agreements, as part of an effort to end the coverup of sexual abuse within the church.

“The confidentiality provisions contained in the disputed agreements were intended to silence” the two men “in direct contradiction” to the U.S. Catholic Church’s Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, the lawsuit says.

The suit was filed by two cousins, La Jarvis Love, of Senatobia, Mississippi, and Joshua Love, of Greenwood, Mississippi, black men from the Mississippi Delta, both 36 years old.

The men say they were repeatedly abused by Franciscan brothers Paul West and the late Don Lucas while they were enrolled in a Catholic grade school in Greenwood, Mississippi.

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US calls for Iran crackdown videos, internet slowly returns

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — As the internet slowly is being revived across Iran after a dayslong, government-imposed shutdown amid demonstrations, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is calling on Iranians to send the U.S. videos “documenting the regime’s crackdown on protestors.”

Pompeo’s tweet early Friday comes as pockets of Iran saw internet over landlines restored.

He wrote: “The U.S. will expose and sanction the abuses.”

Authorities have said the internet may be entirely restored soon, suggesting Iran’s government put down the demonstrations that began Nov. 15 over government-set gasoline prices rising.

Amnesty International says protest unrest and a subsequent security crackdown killed at least 106 people. Iran disputes that figure without offering its own. A U.N. office earlier said it feared the unrest may have killed “a significant number of people.”

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Israel’s Netanyahu indicted on corruption charges

JERUSALEM (AP) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted Thursday in a series of corruption cases, throwing Israel’s paralyzed political system into further disarray and threatening his 10-year grip on power. He rejected calls to resign, angrily accusing prosecutors of staging “an attempted coup.”

The first-ever charges against a sitting Israeli prime minister capped a three-year investigation, with Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit indicting Netanyahu for fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes.

“A day in which the attorney general decides to serve an indictment against a seated prime minister for serious crimes of corrupt governance is a heavy and sad day, for the Israeli public and for me personally,” Mandelblit, who was appointed by Netanyahu, told reporters.

The indictment does not require the 70-year-old Netanyahu to resign, but it significantly weakens him at a time when Israel’s political parties appear to be limping toward a third election in under a year.

An ashen-faced Netanyahu appeared on national TV late Thursday, claiming he was the victim of a grand conspiracy by police and prosecutors who had intimidated key witnesses into testifying against him.

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Teen used ‘ghost gun’ in California high school shooting

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The 16-year-old boy who fatally shot two fellow students and wounded three others last week at a Southern California high school used an unregistered, untraceable “ghost gun,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said Thursday.

Villanueva told media outlets that Nathaniel Berhow’s .45 calibre, 1911-model replica semi-automatic pistol was assembled from gun parts and did not have a serial number.

Such weapons are a growing problem for law enforcement around the country because the parts are easy to obtain and the guns take limited expertise to build. In Southern California, federal authorities say one-third of all the firearms seized are ghost guns.

California has among the strictest gun laws in the country, but they are based on traditional firearms that are made by manufacturers and labeled so ownership can be traced.

“Congress and state legislatures enact all these crimes about gun registration but now the gun industry is creating a way to just bypass the entire thing by creating a mechanism to manufacture weapons yourself,” Villanueva said.

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AP Exclusive: DOJ would take halted executions to high court

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General William Barr told The Associated Press on Thursday that he would take the Trump administration’s bid to restart federal executions after a 16-year hiatus to the Supreme Court if necessary.

Barr’s comments came hours after a district court judge temporarily blocked the administration’s plans to start executions next month. The administration is appealing the decision, and Barr said he would take the case to the high court if Thursday’s ruling stands.

He said the five inmates set to be executed are a small portion of 62 death row inmates.

“There are people who would say these kinds of delays are not fair to the victims, so we can move forward with our first group,” Barr said aboard a government plane to Montana, after he met with local and federal law enforcement officials in Cleveland.

The attorney general unexpectedly announced in July that the government would resume executions next month, ending an informal moratorium on federal capital punishment as the issue receded from the public domain.

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Garrett’s suspension for helmet attack upheld after appeal

CLEVELAND (AP) — Myles Garrett’s goal was to be NFL’s top defensive player this season. He won’t finish it.

Garrett’s indefinite suspension for smashing Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph over the head with a helmet was upheld Thursday by an appeals officer who decided the severe penalty on the Cleveland Browns star defensive end is fair.

One of the league’s most dominant edge rushers, Garrett is banned for the final six regular-season games and playoffs — if Cleveland qualifies — for pulling off Rudolph’s helmet and cracking him with it in the closing seconds of the Browns’ 21-7 win over their AFC North rival last week.

On Wednesday, Garrett attended his appeals hearing in New York and made his case to former player James Thrash for a reduction of his penalty, which will damage Cleveland’s season and stain the 24-year-old’s budding career.

Thrash didn’t find enough compelling evidence to lessen Garrett’s punishment, which will keep him off the field until 2020 — at the earliest.