Trump impeachment news: President claims no president has ever done as much as him 'for religion' as he escalates Christian magazine attacks

Fallout from 'Afghanistan Papers'

After bombshell reports in the Washington Post, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has pushed back on the notion that the US lied about its progress in Afghanistan.

“I know there’s an assertion out there of some sort of a coordinated lie over the course of, say, 18 years. I find that a bit of a stretch; more than a bit of a stretch, I find that a mischaracterization, from my own personal experience,” Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman general Mark Milley told reporters at the Pentagon.

Making money off of prisoners?

A new report finds that New York State county jails charge inmates an estimated $50 million in fees for phone calls, disciplinary tickets and commissary products, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Georgia restores voter registrations

The state came under fire for announcing it would purge over 300,000 voters‚ and 22,000 of those purged will have their rights restored, according to recent reports.

Here's our earlier report on those purges:

The president is continuing the GOP's line of attack against Democratic leaders in the House after Republicans deflected during impeachment hearings and suggesed it was the Democrats who should be charged for abuse of power.

Meanwhile, the president continues to praise the intensely right-wing Brazilian president as he's getting ripped apart for telling reporter that they "look terribly like a homosexual."

Bolsonaro — who has said he's "proudly" homophobic — is currently caught up in, among many things, a money-laundering and corruption scheme that's connected to contract killers and the mob.

Coming to the end of the year, The Independent's Lucy Anna Gray made a list:

The president is tweeting that he's removing MS-13 gang members "and many other people that shouldn’t be here" from "our country" while his schedule says he's at a Christmas reception, which is closed to press.

The White House account also shared the tweet.

Following that reception, he's scheduled to sign the defence spending bill as well as budget legislation aimed to prevent a so-called government shutdown.

After that? He'll head to Mar-a-Lago for his holiday retreat, his first following his impeachment.

Report: White House threatened vetoing 2020 budget package if it included rules for Ukraine aid

The Washington Post reports that the White House had threatened to veto a government spending bill — one that Donald Trump intends to sign tonight to prevent a government shutdown — if Democrats included language that would require "future military aid for Ukraine to be released quickly."

That language ultimately does not appear in the $1.4 trillion bill, but the White House apparently had warned that there was a line the president wasn't going to cross.

The Ukraine inclusion would have "required the White House to swiftly release $250 million in defense money for Ukraine that was part of the spending package."

The president is accused of withholding aid to Ukraine to pressure Kiev to investigate his political opponents, an abuse of power at the heart of his impeachment on Wednesday.

Democrats intended to prevent that aid freeze from happening again by including the language in the proposal, but administration officials intervened or threatened a veto that would lead to an effective shutdown of the government.

Please join us for a nice walk down memory lane, courtesy of Lucy Gray: 

Mr Biden has said he is proud to mentor young people with stutters.