Here’s what you need to know at the end of the day.
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Good evening. Here’s the latest.
1. “I’m not in the business of determining when lies are told to the American people. I am in the business of determining when a crime has been committed.”
Attorney General William Barr spent much of the day answering questions from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee about the special counsel’s report on Russian election meddling and possible obstruction of justice.
Democrats pressed Mr. Barr on why he had not publicly acknowledged concerns about his original summary and why he said that Mr. Trump had cooperated fully with the investigation when he tried to thwart it.
Republicans focused not on Mr. Trump or Mr. Mueller’s report but on Hillary Clinton’s emails and the former F. B. I. officials who opened the Russia investigation. We have video clips and takeaways from the hearing.
Hours after Mr. Barr finished testifying, a congressional aide said the attorney general was expected to skip a House hearing Thursday on the Mueller report. He and Democrats have fought over its format.
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2. The attorney general spent much of his time defending his four-page summary of the Mueller report.
Minutes before Mr. Barr was set to testify, the Justice Department released a letter from March that showed a deep a rift between the special counsel Robert Mueller and Mr. Barr. Mr. Mueller criticized the summary as failing to capture the “context, nature and substance” of the 448-page document.
“The letter is a bit snitty, and I think it was probably written by a member of his staff,” Mr. Barr said at Wednesday’s hearing.
In our Opinion section, the former F. B. I. director James Comey offers his take on Mr. Barr’s handling of the Mueller report.
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3. The national firefighters’ union endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden. President Trump responded on Twitter.
In an early-morning blizzard of 60 tweets and retweets, Mr. Trump attacked the union’s leadership. The number is unusual even for Mr. Trump, and it seems a clear sign that Mr. Trump is anxious about the loyalty of the rank-and-file union voters he reached in 2016. Above, Mr. Biden at a campaign event in Pittsburgh on Monday.
In other Washington news, the White House asked Congress to allocate $4.5 billion in emergency funds for the southwestern border as federal agencies struggle to address the influx of asylum seekers coming into the U.
