THE BIG STORY

The Iowa caucus results are delayed and the campaigns are angry

The Iowa Democratic Party is delaying releasing the results of the Iowa caucus because of reporting inconsistencies. As you can imagine, the campaigns are furious because they’d rather move on with the primary season.

The IDP told campaigns in a call just after midnight that it would release the results on Tuesday, according to two people on the call.

Without any results, all candidates declared themselves winners. Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Joe Biden all spoke on live TV in glowing terms — without any results.

While all the speeches had a triumphant tone to them, Buttigieg’s briefly acknowledged the fact that the results were not known but then straight up declared victory — to the delight of about 2,000 supporters.

As the mess unfolded for the Democrats, the Donald Trump campaign crashed the Iowa caucus and couldn’t stop talking about Sanders.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

STAYING ON TOP OF THIS

Mueller Memos part 5: hundreds of pages of FBI witness interviews were declassified

Last year, BuzzFeed News sued the US government under the Freedom of Information Act for the right to see all the work that Robert Mueller’s team kept secret.

We won that lawsuit, and we’ve been publishing the FBI’s summaries of interviews with witnesses. We just published the fifth installment.

Some of the key findings:

👉Stephen Miller, Hope Hicks, and Jared Kushner sometimes drafted tweets for President Donald Trump

👉Former national security adviser Michael Flynn sought guidance from former Obama administration officials Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes “about how to do things.”

👉 Steve Bannon didn’t think the “Putin stuff” was a big deal.

Impeachment Today

You don't have to go home but you can't stay here. The closing arguments in the impeachment trial were made. For the Democrats, it looked a lot like a Hail Mary. Listen and subscribe.

SNAPSHOTS

Democrats and Trump’s lawyers made their final arguments in the impeachment trial. Following closing arguments, the Senate will take Tuesday off ahead of a vote on Wednesday afternoon on whether to remove Trump from office.

A leaked audio recording shows Iran immediately knew it had shot down a Ukrainian plane. On the recording, the pilot of an inbound passenger plane describes witnessing something resembling a missile being fired, followed by a midair explosion. The head of the Iranian investigation team said Iran would no longer share information with Ukraine after the leak of the recording.

A site tied to Steve Bannon is writing fake news about the coronavirus. G News, which was founded by an exiled billionaire and critic of the Chinese government, claimed without proof that China was prepared to admit the disease originated in its labs. The site previously had a contract with former White House chief strategist Bannon.

President Trump congratulated the wrong state for winning the Super Bowl. The president praised the Kansas City Chiefs for representing “the Great State Of Kansas.” But geography says psych, the Chiefs are from Kansas City, Missouri, which happens to be a whole different state. The memes came in quick.

A court tried to force Ancestry.com to open up its DNA database to police. The company said no. A Pennsylvania court’s move to issue a search warrant to Ancestry.com, the largest DNA testing company in the world, sets off a legal struggle that could go all the way to the Supreme Court.

NOT MUCH TO SAY

As Trump expands his travel ban, Amazon, Google and Apple are silent

In January 2017, when the Trump administration rolled out its first travel ban targeting seven majority Muslim countries, the tech industry was not quiet.

CEOs wrote impassioned letters, a billionaire founder showed up to an airport protest, and multiple companies lent their voices to lawsuits challenging the policy.

Fast forward to 2020, and Trump is imposing travel restrictions on six more countries, including Nigeria and Myanmar, a move that activists have described as “bigoted” and “heartbreaking.”

Except this time, Silicon Valley is nowhere to be found. Historically, the tech industry has made immigration one of its leading political causes. On this ban, one company said there was no need to issue a statement because the ban was “more limited in scope” and had not impacted its employees.

SOMEONE YOU SNUBBED

Lewis Capaldi told the story of being mistaken for a seat filler at the Grammys and it is a thing of beauty

You’re familiar with Glasgow’s own Lewis Capaldi, yeah? He’s the fella soulfully belting out “Someone You Loved,” which was one of the biggest hits of last year. So big, in fact, that it was nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys.

Capaldi, now a Grammy nominee at the young age of 23, was excited to attend the ceremony. He was seated in his prime seat, being a nominee and all. That’s when he was mistaken as a seat-filler. Hearing him tell the whole story is wonderful.

Remember that sometimes a win is just getting up and facing the day,

Elamin