By JIM MUSTIAN and MICHAEL R. SISAK Associated Press
 Donald Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen says he met Tuesday for about 2½ hours with Manhattan prosecutors, who are again investigating hush money payments he made to a porn star who said she had an extramarital affair with the former president. Cohen's meeting came just days after District Attorney Alvin Bragg said his office's yearslong Trump investigation was moving to the "next chapter" following last week's sentencing of Trump's company, the Trump Organization, for tax fraud. A message seeking comment was left with the Manhattan district attorney's office.
House Republicans have opened their long-promised investigation into President Joe Biden and his family. They are wielding the power of their majority to demand information from the Treasury Department and former Twitter executives as they lay the groundwork for public hearings. The Republican-led Oversight Committee requested financial information from the Treasury Department surrounding financial transactions members of the Biden family made, as well as testimony from multiple former Twitter executives, who were involved in the company's handling of an October 2020 story from the New York Post about the president's son. A White House spokesperson called the investigation a "political stunt."
A background investigator failed to check a would-be trooper's mental health history, allowing him to be hired for the Virginia State Police the year before he kidnapped a 15-year-old girl and killed three members of her family in California. The Virginia State Police superintendent wrote in a Dec. 30 letter to the state's inspector general that the hiring of Austin Lee Edwards, despite his 2016 stay in a psychiatric facility, was "the direct result of human error" and appeared to be an isolated incident. Edwards had posed online as a 17-year-old boy while communicating with the 15-year-old girl in California. He killed her family last year after she stopped responding to his messages.
