Comment on A Month That Upended the Presidential Campaign

The Justice Department on Thursday charged Dimitri Simes, pro-Russian pundit and and former head of a Washington think tank, along with his wife, Anastasia Simes, with violating US sanctions by accepting millions of dollars from a Russian state television network and laundering the proceeds. Reached by phone in Moscow, where he has a home, Dimitri Simes, who was an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, declined to comment on the allegations against him.

When New York’s Nassau County signed the first county-level mask ban into law in August, its deputy police commissioner, Kevin Smith, told local news that training was “being conducted [in] the department, which means across ranks.” But that has not happened, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Through an information request reviewed by Mother Jones, NYCLU, a state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, requested policies and training materials used to instruct the county’s police on enforcing the ban.

Seven Colorado counties filed a lawsuit Thursday accusing the state of illegally taking tax money generated from oil and gas extraction and set aside for local governments. The suit, which names Gov. Jared Polis and state Treasurer Dave Young, was filed in Denver District Court by several mostly rural counties on the Western Slope, plus metro Denver’s Douglas County.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will face off for the first time on Sept. 10, when the two presidential candidates are set to debate each other ahead of the presidential election. The 90-minute debate will be hosted by ABC News in Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center at 9 p.m.

This article is part of The D. C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. When some of the biggest donors to conservative causes made explicit their electoral opposition to a second Trump term way back in February of 2023, it came as something of a shock to the Republican orbit.

Turns out the highest-paid jobs in the business sector took the brunt of the layoffs. What does that portend for a Kamala-led economy?