CBS News
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson killed in shooting outside of New York City hotel
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
CBS News
House Republicans block release of Matt Gaetz ethics report
Washington — House Republicans on Thursday blocked two Democratic resolutions that would have compelled the House Ethics Committee to release a potentially damaging report on its investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz, voting to refer the matter back to the committee.
Democratic Reps. Sean Casten of Illinois and Steve Cohen of Tennessee introduced twin privileged resolutions, forcing floor action within two legislative days. In a 206 to 198 vote, all but one Republican voted to refer Casten’s resolution back to the Ethics Committee. Cohen’s resolution met the same fate in a 204 to 198 vote, with one Republican voting with Democrats. Republican Rep. Tom McClintock of California was the only member to cross party lines.
In a statement, Casten accused his Republican colleagues of voting “to sweep these allegations under the rug and set an unfortunate precedent.” He said he would continue to pursue the report’s release.
The votes came after President-elect Donald Trump announced last month that he intended to nominate Gaetz for attorney general, prompting intense scrutiny over the Florida Republican’s background and the House Ethics Committee’s investigation into allegations that Gaetz engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use. Gaetz, who has denied the allegations, withdrew from consideration for the attorney general nomination a little over a week after Trump made the announcement.
Gaetz immediately resigned from Congress after Trump announced he wanted the Florida Republican to join his Cabinet. The timing of his resignation came days before the House panel was set to vote on releasing its report on Gaetz.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, urged the committee to keep the report secret, arguing that a former member is beyond the panel’s jurisdiction and it would set a “terrible precedent.”
“I believe it is very important to maintain the House’s tradition of not issuing ethics reports on people who are no longer members of Congress,” he said on Nov. 15. “The House Ethics Committee’s jurisdiction is over sitting members of Congress. That’s an important rule.”
Casten’s resolution cited four instances in which the Ethics Committee has released reports on its investigations into members after they’ve resigned.
The bipartisan committee met Nov. 20 to consider whether to release the report, but was evenly split along party lines about how to move forward. A day later, Gaetz withdrew himself from consideration, facing a tenuous path to Senate confirmation. There was growing interest from senators on both sides of the aisle in seeing the report before a confirmation vote.
The House Ethics Committee met again Thursday to discuss its investigation into allegations against Gaetz. In a statement, the panel said it is “continuing to discuss the matter.” The committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, who wanted the report made public, did not attend the meeting.
CBS News
Foreign adversary was likely behind Havana Syndrome, House Intelligence leaders say
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence said in an unclassified report released Thursday that it “appears increasingly likely that a foreign adversary is behind some” cases of what officials refer to as “anomalous health incidents” – mysterious illnesses suffered by U.S. national security officials.
The House Intelligence Committee concluded in the report that an intelligence community assessment from 2023 of anomalous health incidents (AHI), commonly called Havana Syndrome, “lacked analytic integrity and was highly irregular in its formulation.”
That 2023 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had deemed it “very unlikely” that a foreign adversary was behind the mysterious injuries, though it did acknowledge that some intelligence agencies had only “low” or “moderate” confidence in that conclusion. Until now that has been the government’s leading assessment of what’s behind the Havana Syndrome.
Thursday’s report also accused the intelligence community of interfering with the House Intelligence Committee’s ongoing investigation.
“Sadly, the [intelligence community] has actively attempted to impede our investigation, but we have nonetheless been able to gather significant evidence, and I have reason to believe that its claims of environmental or social factors explaining AHIs are false,” said Rep. Rick Crawford, the chairman of the Subcommittee on the Central Intelligence Agency, who led the investigation.
What is Havana Syndrome?
A total of 334 American officials have qualified for AHI care in the military health system as of January 2024, according to Thursday’s report. They have symptoms that scientists say could be caused by a beam of microwaves or acoustic ultrasound. White House staff, CIA officers, FBI agents, and military officers and their families are among those who say they were wounded by a secret weapon.
A March 31 60 Minutes report on Havana Syndrome, based on a five-year investigation, revealed new evidence of a potential Russian nexus tied to mysterious illnesses suffered by U.S. national security officials.
Calls for a new Intelligence Community Assessment
After the 60 Minutes report in March, a bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to President Biden calling for a “renewed assessment by the U.S. government” of what officials call “anomalous health incidents.”
In the unclassified report released Thursday, House officials called for the Intelligence Community to release a new report on anomalous health incidents.
“The Subcommittee is aware that the IC (intelligence community) continues to withhold valuable information from the Subcommittee,” House leaders wrote. “For this reason, a final unclassified report cannot be issued at this time. In addition, the Subcommittee plans to issue a classified report that explains why the Subcommittee finds the conclusions reached in the ICA (intelligence community assessment) dubious at best, and misleading at worst.”
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s investigation
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence said it conducted 48 interviews of current and former members of the CIA, FBI, ODNI, Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military, as well as interviews of non-government officials. Committee members reviewed more than 7,500 pages of official records and more than 3,400 pages of records provided by whistleblowers.
Based on their review, committee members said they believe the intelligence community was involved in “stonewalling, slow-walking, and cherry-picking of information” in its Havana Syndrome investigation.
“The Biden Administration and IC (intelligence community) leadership has sought to hinder the Subcommittee’s investigation into AHIs to keep the truth about AHIs from Congress and, by extension, the American public,” committee members wrote in Thursday’s report. “This is unacceptable.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said it disagreed with many of the Committee’s interim findings. An ODNI spokesman said, “Most IC agencies assess that it is very unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported AHIs, and the assertion that we are withholding information that contradicts this analysis or would otherwise illuminate this complex subject is unfounded.”
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA operations officer who was injured in Moscow in December 2017, spoke out about the Thursday report.
“The report indicates to me that not only was there incompetence on the part of CIA, but also willful malfeasance,” Polymeropoulos said.
He was the first CIA officer to go public about his experience.
“They failed to properly investigate the attacks, then cooked the books analytically, while also launching a campaign to belittle the victims as well, denying them medical care. In totality, this ultimately is a staggering betrayal of the CIA’s own people. That is very hard to stomach, from an organization that I dedicated my life to. This report seems to open the door for Congress to fully investigate what looks like a truly historic scandal at CIA. I am both angry, but also feel vindicated, in what has been a very long seven year battle,” Polymeropoulos told 60 Minutes.
The 60 Minutes Havana Syndrome investigation
Greg Edgreen, a now-retired Army lieutenant colonel who ran the Pentagon investigation into anomalous health incidents, previously told 60 Minutes that the bar for proof was set impossibly high. He said it was set so high because the country didn’t want to face hard truths, like the existence of possible failures to protect Americans.
After speaking with 60 Minutes, Edgreen testified before the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Law Enforcement, and Intelligence.
CBS News
NASA delays next 2 Artemis moon missions to address heat shield, other issues
Less than a year after announcing major delays for the next two Artemis moon missions, NASA managers said Thursday the projected flight dates are slipping once again, with the first piloted voyage around the moon now expected in the April 2026 timeframe, and the first lunar landing in mid 2027.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the delays are needed to revise the Orion crew capsule’s re-entry trajectory to reduce stress and prevent the sort of unexpected heat shield damage seen after an unpiloted 2021 test flight — and to complete extensive testing of the capsule’s environmental control and life support systems.
“Based on the data, we have decided, unanimously, to move forward with the current Artemis 2/Orion capsule and heat shield with a modified entry trajectory…to lessen the heat coming back into the Earth’s atmosphere,” Nelson said.
“Additionally, we need to complete our updates to the Orion environmental controls and the life support systems that were identified earlier this year.”
Future heat shields for the Artemis 3 moon landing mission and subsequent flights will use essentially the same materials but with modifications to improve their performance during re-entry.
In the meantime, Nelson said, “We are planning for Artemis 2 to launch in April of ’26 and we’re going to do all in our power, with our commercial partners, to launch earlier.”
The Artemis program aims to send astronauts to the moon’s south polar region where ice deposits may allow crews to one day extract oxygen and hydrogen to produce air, water and rocket propellants that would not have to be carried up, at great expense, from Earth.
Following the launch of Artemis 2, Nelson said NASA is going “to make (any) adjustments that are necessary, and we plan to launch Artemis 3, the first landing on the moon in over a half century. Assuming the SpaceX lander is ready, we plan to launch Artemis 3 in mid-2027. That will be well ahead of the Chinese government’s announced intention (of sending taikonauts to the moon in) 2030…We need to get this Artemis 2 test flight right to ensure the success of our return to the moon.”
NASA launched the Artemis program’s first test flight, Artemis 1, in November 2022, using the agency’s new Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket to send an unpiloted Lockheed Martin-built Orion capsule on a looping flight around the moon and back.
NASA had planned to launch the Artemis 2 mission at the end of this year to carry a three-man one-woman crew around the moon to thoroughly test the spacecraft’s life support, propulsion and other systems.
But after the Artemis 1 flight, engineers discovered the Orion capsule’s 16-foot-wide heat shield suffered unexpected damage during it’s high-speed return from the moon using a technique called a “skip entry.”
In a skip entry, the capsule dips into the atmosphere, slows and rises back up before dropping back into the atmosphere for the final descent. The idea is similar to how a flat rock can skip across a still pond. Skip entries provide a number of benefits, including a wider range of splashdown targets.
The Orion heat shield is designed to ablate, or char, during re-entry when the spacecraft enters Earth’s atmosphere at more than 25,000 mph. But the charred material is intended to stay in place, providing a layer of insulation. During the Artemis 1 re-entry, more charred material separated from the heat shield than computer models predicted.
While the unexpected “liberation” had no impact on the spacecraft — NASA said astronauts would not have even noticed had any been on board — engineers wanted to make sure they understood the underlying cause so they could update computer models to accurately predict re-entry effects across multiple trajectories.
After hundreds of tests and an exhaustive engineering analysis, NASA has “since determined that while the capsule was dipping in and out of the atmosphere as part of that planned skip entry, heat accumulated inside the heat shield’s outer layer,” said Pam Melroy, a former shuttle commander and now deputy administrator of NASA.
That heat build up led to “gases forming and becoming trapped inside the heat shield,” she said. “This caused internal pressure to build up and led to cracking and uneven shedding of that outer layer.”
While the same type of heat shield will be used for the Artemis 2 mission in April 2026, the crew will use a modified re-entry trajectory to reduce the sort of heating that damaged the Artemis 1 heat shield.
As for the Artemis 3 lunar landing flight, the new mid-2027 target launch date assumes SpaceX’s lunar lander, a variant of the upper stage used by the company’s new Super Heavy-Starship rocket, completes multiple test flights in Earth orbit, along with at least one unpiloted lunar landing.
On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced that he was selecting billionaire Jared Isaacman, a space veteran with strong ties to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, to serve as NASA’s next administrator.
During the news conference Thursday, Nelson was asked whether he was concerned that the next administration might make major changes to the Artemis program given SpaceX’s development of the new Super Heavy-Starship rocket.
“First of all, there is one human-rated spacecraft that is flying and that has already flown beyond the moon, and that’s the SLS (Space Launch System) combined with Orion,” Nelson said. “Secondly, this is a partnership. It’s a commercial partnership. It’s an international partnership.
“I think what is going to happen over time is you’re going to have a number of years that we’re going to have the partners flying with NASA, and then whatever the technologies that are developed later on will dictate what is going to be the system that’s flying.”
He concluded by saying, “I don’t see the concern that your question raises, although it’s a legitimate question, that you’re suddenly going to have Starship take over everything.”