President Trump

Updated at 9:27 p.m. ET

House lawmakers voted to impeach President Trump on Wednesday in only the third such rebuke in American history.

The move triggers a trial for Trump in the Senate, expected in January — one in which majority Republicans are likely to permit him to retain his office.

The vote was 230 to 197 on the first of two articles of impeachment — abuse of power — with one member voting present. The House then passed the second article — obstruction of Congress — with a vote of 229 to 198, with one member voting present.

Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., dismissed the impeachment process against President Trump as a political proceeding rather than a judicial one.

"I'm not an impartial juror. This is a political process. There's not anything judicial about it," McConnell told reporters on Tuesday. "The House made a partisan political decision to impeach. I would anticipate we will have a largely partisan outcome in the Senate. I'm not impartial about this at all."

Updated at 12:12 p.m. ET

The House Judiciary Committee on Friday approved two articles of impeachment against President Trump, making him the fourth president in American history to face impeachment.

In contrast to Thursday's contentious back-and-forth between the two parties, Friday's session was devoid of rancor, or even any debate. Immediately after calling the session to order, Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., ordered two votes, one for each article. Both were approved 23-17 along party lines.

Updated at 10:15 a.m. ET

Democrats are on track to impeach the president by the end of next week. After more than 14 hours of debate Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee approved impeachment articles against President Trump on Friday morning.

As the impeachment inquiry against President Trump has unfolded, one name in particular has surfaced over and over again in both private hearing transcripts and public testimony: the president's personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani.

Congressional testimony has placed Giuliani at the center of the Ukraine affair, with multiple witnesses telling House investigators that he helped spearhead an irregular diplomatic channel between the U.S. and Ukraine.

Attorneys for porn star Stormy Daniels are asking a judge to grant them attorney fees before competing claims on her 450 thousand dollar settlement with the City of Columbus are dealt with. 

Updated at 8:50 p.m. ET

House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against President Trump on Tuesday morning, charging him with abuse of power in the Ukraine affair and obstruction of Congress.

Read the articles of impeachment here.

President Trump has decided to stay out of the impeachment inquiry being conducted by the House of Representatives.

White House counsel Pat Cipollone rejected an offer from House Democrats that would have allowed the president to send counsel to represent him at future impeachment hearings.

In a short two-paragraph letter to Democrats, Cipollone said the impeachment inquiry is "completely baseless and has violated basic principles of due process and fundamental fairness."

Updated at 12:43 p.m. ET

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced Thursday morning that House Democrats will move ahead with drafting articles of impeachment against President Trump, though she did not define the scope of those articles.

"His wrongdoing strikes at the very heart of our Constitution," Pelosi said, referring to Trump's efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate political rivals while hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid were on hold earlier this year.

Updated at 4:49 p.m. ET

Prosecutors could bring more charges in the case of two Soviet-born associates of Rudy Giuliani — although it wasn't precisely clear when, what or who else might be involved after a conference in New York City on Monday.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman face charges of conspiracy, false statements and falsification of records in connection with two alleged schemes to violate U.S. election laws. But it's their work helping Giuliani dig up dirt in Ukraine that has put the pair under intense public scrutiny.

About 100 pages of newly released State Department documents show Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani had at least two phone conversations in the weeks before a U.S. ambassador in Ukraine was removed from her post.

Additionally, the files show a White House aide played a role in connecting Giuliani's team with officials at the State Department so that Giuliani could get on Pompeo's official call schedule in late March.

Attorneys for porn star Stormy Daniels are challenging a request by President Trump's lawyers to stake claim to a settlement between Daniels and the City of Columbus.  

Updated at 5:03 p.m. ET

A top State Department aide questioned the legality of a U.S. president asking for an investigation into a political rival in his hours-long, closed-door deposition before congressional impeachment investigators.

"Politically related prosecutions are not the way of promoting the rule of law. They undermine the rule of law," said George Kent, deputy assistant secretary in the State Department's Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs.

Attorneys for President Trump have notified the court overseeing a settlement between the City of Columbus and porn star Stormy Daniels of money owed to him by Daniels. 

Updated at 1 p.m. ET

The House of Representatives voted Thursday 232-196 to pass a resolution formalizing its impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Just two Democrats voted no — Reps. Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey.

Amid the debate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called it a "sad day."

President Trump once promised that coal and steel would be the heart of a revived U.S. economy. 

Updated 4:30 p.m. ET

House Democrats unveiled a resolution Tuesday reaffirming their impeachment inquiry and setting out the process for it to continue examining whether the president improperly tried to pressure Ukraine into launching an investigation into a potential political rival.

The measure will enable public hearings and a release of the witness interviews already taken by House committees and will allow the president and his attorneys to cross-examine witnesses.

The top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council repeatedly raised concerns with his superiors and lawyers about President Trump's demands that Ukraine investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who is a veteran of the Iraq War and expected to testify Tuesday as part of the House impeachment inquiry, listened in on the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Updated on Jan. 20 at 11:15 p.m. ET

Updated at 5:33 p.m. ET

House Democrats won an important victory in federal court on Friday when a judge ordered the Justice Department to surrender now-secret material from the Russia investigation — and, more broadly, validated the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

Among the key figures embroiled in the impeachment inquiry into President Trump is Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who announced last week that he will be resigning later this year.

Two of Rudy Giuliani's associates appeared in federal court Wednesday in Manhattan, where they pleaded not guilty to charges of illegally funneling foreign donations to U.S. political candidates.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman are both U.S. citizens born in the former Soviet Union: Parnas in Ukraine, and Fruman in Belarus.

The story of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman unfolds like a globe-trotting mystery over more than a year.

When the two associates of President Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, were arrested at an airport this month for campaign finance violations, it wasn't immediately clear how — or even if — those activities were related to the impeachment inquiry into Trump.

But even before their arrest by the FBI, the two Soviet-born men were among the people whom Congress wanted to interview.

Ambassador William Taylor delivered an explosive opening statement to congressional investigators Tuesday.

Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, described a shadow foreign policy operation being led by President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani where U.S. aid to Ukraine was contingent on the country undertaking investigations that could help Trump in his campaign for reelection in 2020.

President Trump's acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, on Sunday again tried to control the damage from his earlier acknowledgment that the White House used nearly $400 million in aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate the 2016 presidential election.

Since Mulvaney made the stunning admission on Thursday, he has been walking the remarks back and assigning responsibility to the media, insisting that his words have been misconstrued.

Each week — and some days, it seems, each hour — brings more clarity to the picture of the Ukraine affair and the political crisis it sparked in Washington over impeachment.

But some of the biggest questions still don't have answers.

Here's a look at where the saga stands, what investigators want to learn and what major decisions still must be reached before the fever breaks.

The Ukraine affair

No one disputes the basic outlines of the Ukraine affair, including President Trump: