It's the Midday News Wrap, our regular Friday effort to make sense of the week that was.
This was a week of unraveling and unveiling. The Trump administration unraveled Obama-era rules on internet privacy and the environment. The House Intelligence Committee, which is -- or was -- investigating Russian meddling in the U.S. election and possible Trump ties to Russia, unraveled itself -- cancelling its public hearings amid loud calls for Committee chair Devin Nunes to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
The New York Times and the Washington Post reported that Nunes met secretly with two or possibly three White House officials and then briefed the president about information that he had not shared with his own committee. The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating the same issues picked up the slack in what is, at least for the moment, a much more bi-partisan way. It held ITS first hearing yesterday, which included dramatic testimony from a former FBI agent.
In Baltimore, Mayor Catherine Pugh unveiled her first budget proposal, which calls for lowering taxes, while spending more on schools and police. She also vetoed a bill that would have raised the minimum wage in the city to $15 by the year 2022.
Britain took its first formal steps to exit the European Union, and Scotland took another step toward exiting Britain…
To help us untangle these stories, Tom is joined in Studio A by a terrific panel of journalists:
Frances Stead Sellers is a writer on the national staff of The Washington Post. She covered the 2016 presidential election for The Post and she is currently a journalism fellow at Oxford University in the UK. She was a key member of the Post team that produced the best-selling biography “Trump Revealed…”
E.R. Shipp is here. She is Associate Professor and Journalist in Residence at Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communication. She is a columnist for the Baltimore Sun and the winner, in 1996, of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, when she was at the NY Daily News. She also worked as a reporter and editor at The New York Times and as the ombudsman at The Washington Post.
And Andy Green is here as well. He’s the Editorial page editor for the Baltimore Sun.
We also take your calls and comments.
