Trump says at marathon Cabinet meeting he wants death penalty for murderers in D.C.

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff said today that a bilateral meeting between Ukraine and Russia could still happen even though neither side has presented any concrete details of where or when such a meeting could take place.

“I’m meeting with the Ukrainians this week. So I will be meeting with them this week in New York. And that’s a big signal. We talk to the Russians every day. I think that we may end up seeing a bilateral meeting,” Witkoff told Fox News’ Bret Baier. “My own opinion is, is that the president is going need, going to be needed at the table to finish a deal.”

Trump has said he is unsure whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet soon. “I don’t know that they’ll meet — maybe they will, maybe they won’t,” Trump said yesterday at the White House during an Oval Office meeting with South Korean leader Lee Jae-myung.

One of the main sticking points in talks between the two countries has been the issue of Ukraine’s potentially ceding land to Russia, which Witkoff said had come up in talks with Russia. “The Russians have put a peace proposal on the table. It involves Donetsk. It may not be, it may not be something that the Ukrainians can take,” he said.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly rejected the possibility of giving land over to Russia.

Bill Gates visited the White House this afternoon for a scheduled meeting with Trump, a senior White House official told NBC News.

A spokesperson for Gates later told NBC News that the two met to discuss the importance of U.S. global health programs.

“Bill met with the president to discuss the importance of U.S. global health programs and health research that is necessary to save lives, protect Americans’ health, and preserve U.S. leadership in the world,” the spokesperson said.

Earlier this month, the Gates Foundation committed $2.5 billion to women’s health across the globe.

The Trump administration’s new pick for co-deputy director of the FBI, Andrew Bailey, brings more legal and managerial experience than current Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Bailey, who was resoundingly re-elected as Missouri’s attorney general last fall, says his focus is on “enforcing the laws as written” and “protecting the Constitution.”

But a top Senate Democrat and other critics say that Bailey’s two-year tenure as Missouri’s attorney general was overly political and that he has a track record of aiding Trump politically while in office.

“President Trump is appointing a partisan politician,” Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement to NBC News. “Mr. Bailey is another Trump loyalist who has continuously peddled the ‘Big Lie,’ that the 2020 election was stolen.”

“This appointment further proves President Trump will stop at nothing to politicize and weaponize the federal government’s most prestigious and powerful law-enforcement agency to protect his allies and punish his critics,” he said.

Read the full story here.

In the neighborhood where Washington saw its first homicide in nearly two weeks early today, residents are divided over the value of Trump’s surge of federal law enforcement forces into the city.

NBC News talked to more than a dozen people today who live and work in the area surrounding the 300 block of Anacostia Road in Southeast D.C., where, according to the Metropolitan Police Department, city officers had responded to a fatal shooting shortly after midnight. It was the first homicide reported in D.C. since Aug. 13.

This afternoon, after schools had let out for the day, more than a half-dozen children loitered on the front steps of an apartment complex on the block where the shooting occurred.

The local response to Trump’s “federal takeover” of D.C. was mixed, with some crediting him for taking an active interest in public safety in the city and others criticizing him for a buildup they described as unnecessary or aimed at the wrong parts of the city.

Read the full story here.

Trump congratulated Cracker Barrel on social media tonight for returning to its "Old Timer" logo after it faced criticism and a plummeting stock value when it unveiled a new logo design last week.

"Congratulations 'Cracker Barrel' on changing your logo back to what it was," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "All of your fans very much appreciate it. Good luck into the future. Make lots of money and, most importantly, make your customers happy again!"

Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill had criticized the logo's redesign, which omitted a character known as “Uncle Herschel” who leaned against a barrel. Earlier today, Trump urged the company to "go back to the old logo."

Deputy White House chief of staff Taylor Budowich said Cracker Barrel thanked Trump during a call this evening for weighing in. "They wanted the President to know that they heard him," Budowich wrote on X.

When National Guard troops were deployed here this month, Trump promised that they would fight crime and make the streets safe again. But in neighborhoods like Columbia Heights, the takeover has created a real sense of terror for immigrants, who say they feel they are being racially targeted and living in a dystopian version of the city they love.

Immigrants and immigration advocates told NBC News that the federal takeover of the nation’s capital two weeks ago has left vibrant communities and businesses “deserted.” Both naturalized citizens and those who are in the country illegally said there is a palpable sense of fear now. People are afraid to go grocery shopping, show up at work and go about their daily lives, they said.

Margarita, a 38-year-old mother of four, is an undocumented immigrant who came to the United States from El Salvador. She opened a Latino restaurant this year and said half of her employees are too terrified to come to work.

One employee came in with tears streaming down his face after he witnessed an arrest and “how they mistreated people in front of his face,” she said in Spanish.

Read the full story here.

The NAACP sued Texas today over the electoral map Republicans in the Legislature passed this month with the aim of providing the GOP five additional congressional seats.

"These maps are an affront to Texas’s voters of color," attorneys wrote on behalf of the civil rights group in a complaint filed in federal court in El Paso. "This Court should throw out these three plans and order a redrawing of the plans so as to cure the racially discriminatory intent that infects all three plans and to restore the voting strength legally due to Black voters and other voters of color in Texas."

Attorneys representing the NAACP urged the court to bar the state from using the maps, which they contended violated the U.S. Constitution's 14th and 15th Amendments and the Voting Rights Act.

“The state of Texas is only 40 percent white, but white voters control over 73 percent of the state’s congressional seats,” Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a statement today. “It’s quite obvious that Texas’s effort to redistrict mid-decade, before next year’s midterm elections, is racially motivated. The state’s intent here is to reduce the members of Congress who represent Black communities, and that, in and of itself, is unconstitutional.”

The NAACP has also urged blue states like California and New York to begin redistricting to counter the new maps in Texas.

The Democratic National Committee next month will start the process for considering the order in which state primaries will take place for the 2028 election.

The DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee announced today that it will meet in September to formally launch a process for states to apply to be part of the early state presidential primary calendar. DNC Chair Ken Martin said that Democrats would hear pitches from various states and that the process would take them into the spring.

“We’re planning for meetings throughout the fall and winter and through the spring to make sure that we have a rigorous, effective and fair calendar process,” Martin said. “We need this process to give us the strongest possible candidate, a candidate that’s battle tested to win and ready to lead America forward.”

Under former President Joe Biden, Democrats removed Iowa and New Hampshire as early states, instead opting to put South Carolina first in the nomination calendar. That order could change again.

James Fishback, a Trump-aligned investor, said he has been “working behind the scenes” to help expedite Cook’s removal as a Federal Reserve governor.

He said he sent a memo Friday afternoon to Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and the White House laying out why Trump could move to immediately fire Cook.